On June 29th, Family Foundations Academy, a Delaware charter school in New Castle, DE submitted a major modification request to move their elementary school this summer to one of the two buildings formerly occupied by Reach Academy for Girls and wants to move their middle school to the other building at Reach the following year. They also plan to increase enrollment from 810 to 1100 in a potential modification request to be submitted in the fall.
I check the DOE website on a daily basis, especially the charter school section, and I must have missed this one. Probably because it was listed under 2014-2015. As well, I do check their calendar for meetings. The Charter School Accountability Committee is required to give public notice for any of their meetings. They held a meeting on Monday, July 13th, and while the information was on the Delaware Public Meeting calendar, my first place to look is the actual calendars on the DOE website, but as I originally wrote in this article there is not a case of non-transparency, just a blogger not looking in all the right places, so my apologies to the CSAC on this one! My only beef with this is if the decision was going to be made in the 2015-2016 fiscal year, why would they put it under 2014-2015? I’m sure the answer would be because it was submitted on June 29th, the second to last day of the fiscal year. No big deal on that.
Below are the application and Charter School Accountability Committee initial meeting report. Of note, former CSAC member Chuck Taylor is not listed, but Deborah Wilson with the Wilmington Metropolitan Urban League is. Jennifer Nagourney, Executive Director of the Charter School Office, did inform me Wilson has been a member of the committee for the past few months, and I do see her on some activity from February. If that name sounds familiar, she was one of the chief civil rights group voices against the opt-out bill, House Bill 50. I did make a request to Nagourney that the members of the Charter School Accountability Committee be listed on the DOE website with their dates of service.
Looks like there will be two new empty buildings for future charters in the upcoming year…
The Season Of Myths 