Contract for Charter School Conversion Fails to Pass at Montgomery County School Board
A contract to convert some Montgomery Public Schools into charter schools failed to pass at a meeting of the Montgomery County school board this afternoon.
The proposed contract was presented by the Montgomery Education Foundation. MEF had received approval by the state department of education to create the first conversion charter schools by the fall. Now it appears there will be no charter schools in Montgomery County by that time.
“We worked to get the contract within that 60-day time frame,” Montgomery Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Ann Roy Moore told Alabama News Network. “However, as superintendent I couldn’t sign it. It’s something that had to be approved by the board. So the board looked at it and they still have a lot of questions,” she said.
“If we need to make changes, we’re going to go to companies that have experience in doing this kind of work. Montgomery Education Foundation doesn’t have the level of experience that needs to be done to make these changes,” state school board member Ella Bell said.
Some board members said they only had 36 hours to review hundreds of pages of documents. The deadline to have approved a contract was today.
The plan had called for establishing a contract with MEF to convert the existing Davis Elementary School, E.D. Nixon Elementary School, Bellingrath Middle School and Lanier High School into charter schools over a four-year period while remaining a part of Montgomery Public Schools.
While the school board would maintain many fiscal and administrative duties, MEF would have managed the schools and assumed instructional duties. Students zoned to those schools would have remained in them.
MEF touted plans to provide new learning environments, increased accountability, improved teacher support and raised expectations A minimum of 20% of each school’s unique board would have been made up of parents.
