State frowns upon charter school bid

The Orange County Academy, a proposed charter school that would have been the first in Newport-Mesa, hit another stumbling block this week as its backers withdrew their petition after a negative review from a state advisory board.

At a Monday meeting in Sacramento with the Advisory Commission on Charter Schools, the petitioners opted to pull their proposal before the State Board of Education could rule on it.

Newport-Mesa Unified School District and the county voted against the charter school, which would combine classroom instruction with home schooling. The school board turned down the academy in January, with the Orange County Department of Education doing the same in April. In the weeks before the county’s vote, the district encouraged employees and parents to write to the board and ask for a rejection.

Dan Adelseck, a real estate investor and vice president of the charter school board, now says the petitioners will revise their plan and shop it to other districts in Orange County. The founders had hoped to establish their school in Newport Beach.

“We had a location in Newport-Mesa that we were looking for as a location for our school,” Adelseck said. “It was central, had good access. It seemed like a logical place to go to, but there’s also the basic-aid issue.”

Much of the local opposition to the academy stemmed from the fact that Newport-Mesa is a basic-aid district, supported by local taxes rather than state funds. When the founders proposed the academy to the district in December 2005, many complained that almost none of the nearly 200 signatures on their petition came from Newport-Mesa residents.

As a result, Newport-Mesa officials didn’t want to drain their expenses to support a school that mostly served children from other cities. However, the school board faulted the proposal for other reasons, calling it vague on a number of points. The academy, designed for kindergarten through the eighth grade, would have held classes two days a week and trained parents to teach at home three days.

“We certainly had a concern that there was not support within our Newport-Mesa community for the proposal,” said Susan Astarita, assistant superintendent of elementary education. “We had a great concern about the education program, the ability of parents to provide this rigorous curriculum to students. It requires a tremendous amount of training for a teacher, let alone a parent, to be able to provide that kind of curriculum.”

The state advisory commission, in its report, faulted the proposal for lacking specifics and showing a poor understanding of independent study requirements.

Deborah Probst, the education program consultant for the state’s Charter Schools Division, said that although the backers had amended their petition, the state was only permitted to look at the proposal sent to the district and county.

“It may be a very sound petition,” she said. “The specificity that was lacking may be there now.”