Though Morgan Hill Unified lost the battle to fend off a charter school targeting low-income Latinos, it may yet win the war — by showing that not enough parents are interested in attending the school.
Morgan Hill, as well as the Sunnyvale School District, are among a handful of districts in the state aggressively questioning parents who support charter schools — a tactic that charter advocates charge is intended to erode support and evade a state law requiring school districts to provide campuses for charter schools.
For Voices College-Bound Language Academy, which won permission Nov. 19 from the Santa Clara County School Board to open in Morgan Hill next year, only 29 potential students could be verified, the Morgan Hill district claims in a preliminary report. The small number may allow the district to avoid providing classrooms for Voices next year and in fact threatens the school’s viability.
Most school districts and teacher unions have reacted with hostility to charter schools, which usually hire nonunion employees, and siphon money and students from districts. Charters are independently run public schools that do not charge tuition.
But some districts are more hostile than others. Charter school proponents accuse Morgan Hill of harassing, intimidating and confusing parents interested in Voices. Under the law, districts must offer space to charters that have at least 80 children who live within district borders.
Morgan Hill expanded on a routine call to verify signatures on Voices’ petition seeking space. The district asked parents a series of questions, including whether they thought signing petitions would automatically enroll their children in the charter school, whether they were paid to sign and whether they knew that their children would lose all benefits, such as transportation, that the school district offers.
“Another question was why I wanted to change schools, since the district had many schools and programs,” wrote parent Cristina Casas in a letter in Spanish protesting the district’s interrogation.
“These kinds of communications are unacceptable and an inappropriate use” of parent contact information, wrote Sarah J. Kollman, an attorney representing Voices, in a letter to Morgan Hill Superintendent Steve Betando. In fact, she added, the inappropriate questioning undercuts the district’s argument that some parents are not interested in the charter school.
Betando said that the district is still verifying signatures and has been simply trying to find out if people knew what they were signing and whether there’s enough interest in the charter school.
“We have no indication that the survey caused parents to change their answers,” he said.
This week, he said he hadn’t reviewed Kollman’s letter with attorneys to see if he needed to respond to her.
In Sunnyvale, a caller checking signatures on a petition for Spark Charter School hinted that parents needed to dis-enroll their children from district schools — an unusual assertion, since families moving out of the district or sending children to private school don’t need to formally withdraw their children from Sunnyvale schools first.
A caller asked parent Niti Madan if she would come to the district office to sign a release form — even though Madan’s preschooler doesn’t even attend a district school.
“I got really furious about this question,” said Madan, who hopes to send her son to Spark if it opens next year.
Like Voices in Morgan Hill, Spark received a green light from the Santa Clara County Board of Education recently, a decision overriding denial by local school boards. Spark originally was approved last fall to open this year, but in the spring the Sunnyvale district rescinded its approval, and Spark appealed to the county board.
“I really found it to be an intimidation tactic,” said Madan. Because charters often hold lotteries in the spring for admission, parents have no guarantee that their child will be admitted. Many prospective Spark parents have children in Sunnyvale’s high-performing but overcrowded schools. So, Madan pointed out, the threat of their children losing a slot in their home school and then being sent to a lower-performing school if they didn’t get into Spark — was enough to scare parents into dropping support for the charter.
Sunnyvale Superintendent Benjamin Picard said “we’re not trying to dissuade anyone from attending Spark Charter School.”
But Ricardo Soto of the California Charter Schools Association said that districts shouldn’t be asking irrelevant, presumptuous questions just to verify signatures.
“To suggest parents will have to sign something withdrawing children from their schools, without being clear what they mean,” Soto said, “crosses the line.”
Contact Sharon Noguchi at 408-271-3775. Follow her at Twitter.com/noguchionk12.
