State Supreme Court To Hear a Youthbuild’s Plea For Charter

Ryan Hess

Copyright © 2004 by MII Publications Inc.
December 27, 2004

Courtesy reprint for Goldberg Kohn Black Rosenbloom & Moritz

ETR is published weekly by MII Publications.

Youth Programs

STATE SUPREME COURT TO HEAR A YOUTHBUILD’S PLEA FOR CHARTER

by Ryan Hess

Copyright  ©  2004 by MII Publications Inc.

Reprinted with permission from the Employment & Training Reporter , Vol. 36 No. 18, December 27, 2004, p.  277

After a half decade of petitioning, an Illinois nonprofit’s bid to turn its youth employment program into a charter school is set to be heard by the state supreme court.

Becoming a charter school would boost the finances of YouthBuild Rockford, enable expansion of its educational programming and elevate the status of the credential its participants obtain.

A state supreme court ruling on the matter could clarify whether education officials can deny a charter to an organization in Illinois simply because it would move school education funds out of school districts that are financially troubled.

In late November, the Illinois Supreme Court agreed to take up YouthBuild Rockford’s appeal of decisions made by its local school district and board of education — and affirmed by a county circuit and state appellate court — denying the program’s request to become a charter school. The court is expected to decide the case sometime in 2005, following a back-and-forth process of written arguments and an oral debate.

Serving about 50 students a year, Comprehensive Community Solutions offers its YouthBuild program, which combines GED preparation with hands-on construction training building low-cost housing, with the support of a variety of funding streams.

WIA, AmeriCorps

Over the years the program has been run with WIA funding, AmeriCorps funding, youth offender reentry grants, federal Department of Housing and Urban Development YouthBuild grants, state YouthBuild funds, revenue from housing sales, donations and other dollars.

Funds from any type of traditional education agency were conspicuously absent from the list that Executive Director Kerry Knodle could recall, while discussing the issue with MII.

A number of reasons prompted the organization’s quest to turn its program into a charter school. A waiting list that runs several hundred out-of-school young people long was among them.

So were program participants obtaining GEDs very quickly and then asking to learn more from the educational side of the program, and an increasing number of participants applying to college, Knodle said.

“We said, ‘Well, it’s not that they can’t do it with the GED, but we would be serving them better with a high school diploma,’ ” he said. “As we thought about how in the world we could develop more resources to serve young people, the charter school made the list.”

Twenty-six of 200 YouthBuild programs around the country are known to be charter schools, according to YouthBuild USA, an association for youth employment programs of this design.

In 1996, Prairie State lawmakers enacted a charter school law that gives local school boards the authority to grant charters to nonprofit organizations and allows for the appeal of denied charter petitions to the Illinois State Board of Education.

Three years later, Comprehensive Community Solutions proposed turning YouthBuild Rockford into a charter school, a move that would allow it to grant high school diplomas and receive per pupil funding that would otherwise go to the district.

Rockford’s school board denied the request, citing concerns and unanswered questions covering a range of topics from curriculum to administration.

Revision

The nonprofit took these concerns to the drawing board and accordingly revised its plan for the YouthBuild Rockford charter school.

As it stands now, this includes enrolling between 75 and 150 participants, ranging from 17 to 21 years old, per year as students. Knodle said his agency plans to continue to serve students up to 24 years old in a practically identical fashion as the proposed charter school, but it would have to do so using only non-school funding.

Instruction would cover an array of academic subjects. Curriculum would be geared to Illinois learning standards. The program would retain its on-site, hands-on vocational component, but instead of offering just construction training, it would also include this style of preparation for manufacturing and information technology careers.

Presented with a revised plan in 2001, the school board — on a split vote — again denied the youth program a charter for a number of reasons.

This time, the nonprofit appealed to the state board of education, and a charter school advisory panel of the board’s professional staff reviewed the case.

6 Points

The school board had based its decision on six points: the district already had an alternative high school; dropouts should not be considered students by state law and schools, of course, must teach students; a weekly stipend YouthBuild Rockford offers participants might attract students for the wrong reasons; the program could not show a success rate operating as a school; and the charter would cost the school district per-pupil financing.

“Given the dire financial situation, the Rockford School District cannot take on more debt,” the record reads.

At this point, it’s worth noting that, under the state’s charter school law, school boards must work out a funding rate for the charter schools they approve, somewhere between 80 and 125 percent of their annual per pupil expenditure of state funds. The charters get this apportionment based on their enrollment.

At the time, according to court records, the district was running a $20 million deficit in its general fund.

The appeal panel refuted every reason the school board offered for turning down the charter bid in a report it submitted to the state board of education.

This report recommended that the state board grant the program a charter and described a need for services to dropouts in Rockford. It also made note of letters of support for the program sent in by community organizations, the local police and state and local public social service agencies.

Panel

“The appeal panel believes that approving the YouthBuild Rockford Charter School would be in the best interests of the students it is designed to serve,” the report says.

When the state board took up the issue, one member moved that it follow the advisory panel’s recommendation, but the vote split 4-to-4 and by the board’s rules the program was denied a charter.

Minutes of the meeting show that those who voted “no” made comments concerned with the charter school’s impact on the school district’s financing.

In the record, the decision consists of a single sentence: “The proposed charter school is not economically sound for Rockford School District 205 in view of the serious financial problems that currently exist in the district.”

Comprehensive Community Solutions appealed this at the county and state appellate levels. For the most part, the agency has lost. A judge at the county circuit court asked the state board of education to provide a few more sentences of explanation for its reasoning and was given an additional two paragraphs that stuck to the same basic point.

YouthBuild Rockford’s attorney, David Chizewer, told MII that the meaty question of the case he is putting before the supreme court is whether the board’s decision is appropriately based, given Illinois charter school law.

The law outlines 15 requirements for approval of proposed charter schools, nine of which deal with academics. Several cover operational issues, such as transportation and staff contracts. Only one deals with economics and budgeting.

It requires proposals to show that “the terms of the charter as proposed are economically sound for both the charter school and the school district.”

Chizewer is arguing that the phrase the terms of the charter as proposed signals that decision making should exclude consideration of financial situations that exist independently of the charter. That losing students to a charter school might add to the school district’s preexisting deficit should not matter, he said.

“It would seem ironic that being in financial troubles protects a district from any challenges to the status quo of its academic difficulties,” Chizewer said.

The state board and the school district are both defendants in the case. Requests by MII to discuss the matter, left with the state board’s communications specialist and with the district’s legal office, were ignored.

On Dec. 4, the Rockford Register Star newspaper quoted School Board President Nancy Kalchbrenner as saying, “Maybe we need to have them come back in,” while commenting on the court’s agreeing to take YouthBuild Rockford’s case.

More than a week later, the phone over at Comprehensive Community Solutions had yet to ring in this regard and Knodle and Chizewer said they were anticipating their day in the state’s highest court.

Copyright  ©  2004 by MII Publications Inc.