JC Cunningham, running for Georgia House District 175
against incumbent Amy Carter,
spells out his opposition to the charter school amendment.
-jsq
Video by George Boston Rhynes for bostongbr on YouTube.
Actually, it's even worse than JC indicates, because because HB 797 specifies more money per pupil for charter than for public schools, and the difference has to be made up out of local sales or property taxes.
-jsq
Here’s another potential charter school referendum that BallotPedia doesn’t seem to have caught yet, in New Jersey.
John Mooney wrote for NJ Spotlight 3 February 2012, Assembly Committee Votes to Put Charters Under Local Control: Bill calls for local referendum on any school that wants to be granted a charter in a NJ district,
The Assembly education committee yesterday moved a bill that would
give local voters the right to approve new charters in their home districts. If passed by both houses, the law would make New Jersey only the third state to require charter schools to face a local referendum.
First proposed last year, the new bill has been toughened for the new session. Amendments filed with the bill would make those referendums retroactive for as many as 30 urban and suburban schools awaiting their final charters.
The votes would come after the state’s preliminary approval, but often as much as a year can lapse before the final charter is granted and a school can open.
NJ bill A1877 seems to have gotten stuck in the NJ state Senate Education Committee back in May. It has 21 sponsors, starting with Patrick Diegnan (D-Middlesex), shown in the picture above.
Related bill A2147 got as far as a second reading in the Assembly in February.
Charter schools in Georgia already have to be approved by local school boards. Let’s not give up that local control. Vote No on the charter school referendum in November.
-jsq
Thanks to Jim Galloway, we learned that charter school proponents say “No other state has had a positive outcome for a charter-positive ballot initiative.” OK, what other states have had any sort of charter school referendums? Such ballot initiatives have at least been tried in Massachusetts, Michigan, and Washington.
BallotPedia records some state charter school referendums.
In Massachusetts,
charter school proponents couldn’t even get enough signatures to put a
pro-charter school referendum on the ballot this year.
The measure would have removed limits on number of charter schools, their funding, and enrollment. Other changes would have been made in laws that governed charter schools, including requiring approval of qualified applications for charter schools to be in districts where there was low student performance.
In Michigan, a referendum to ban for-profit charter schools may be on the ballot in November:
Continue readingOn facebook, Save Strickland Mill just posted a critique of certain parts of the VDT’s writeup on the Remerton City Council’s Strickland Mill vote. -jsq
Valdosta Daily Times, September 12, 2012Continue reading
Mill to come down: Buildings to be razed, historic tower to remain
by Quinten PlummerVALDOSTA — The iconic smoke stack will still tower over the
City of Remerton, according to local officials, but the majority of the historic Remerton Mill complex will be demolished and converted into a park after the City Council gave the mill’s owners the go-ahead for demolition during Monday evening’s regular session.
This is not a factual statement: the city council’s motion is as follows: Councilman Bill Wetherington made the following motion which was unanimously voted in by the council members present that night (note that councilman Sam Flemming was not in attendance)
“I move to approve the certificate of appropriateness 2012-04 for 1853 W. Gordon to be issued and effective as of October 25th 2012 for a period of one year from that date with the condition that the cotton mill smokestack remains intact and shall continue to remain intact in accordance with title 18 of the code of City of Remerton.”The mill’s ownership group simply wants relief from its obligations to the property, and Remerton Mayor Cornelius Holsendolph said the restoration of the mill is just too large of a project for a city of Remerton’s size.
That is the reason why
A recent poll shows markedly lower support
for the November charter school
referendum than polls in March and July, which were already down from January.
At this rate, the charter school referendum can lose as badly in November
as T-SPLOST did in July.
Maybe people are catching on that diverting local taxes to control by
a state appointed body is a bad idea,
especially this time when the money would end up going to private profit.
Georgia Family Council wrote, presumably in January, Poll Shows Support for Charter School Changes,
On January 24, the Georgia Charter School Association and My School, My Choice Georgia held a news conference on Capitol Hill to release the results of a new study regarding public school choice….
The new numbers showed that 52 percent of voters are dissatisfied with the public system as it currently stands. A whopping 72 percent feel that a group other than local school boards should be able to authorize charter schools, the basis for HB 881. Moreover, Georgia voters tend to support a “money follows the child” approach to charter school funding.
So there’s a baseline for January for what proponents of charter schools claimed: 72% support for something very like the charter school referendum that ended up on the November ballot.
Or not. That writeup includes a link to georgiaschoolchoice.com, but that domain is no longer registered. This is probably it over on the snazzy new gacharters.org website. The gacharters.org writeup doesn’t mention 72%, and does say:
Continue readingT-SPLOST proponents are up to their old tricks again, starting with the preamble to the charter school referendum. And Bert “Little Goose” Brantley, formerly of Lowndes County, defends that wording.
Paul Crawley wrote for 11alive.com September 12 2012, Is Charter Schools Amendment wording biased?
Here we go again, apparently another ballot issue with questions about whether it’s worded fairly.
First, it was the July 31st transportation sales tax issue, known as T-SPLOST, which Georgia voters rejected overwhelmingly.
Opponents howled when they found out the ballot preamble wording promised to “create jobs” and “relieve traffic congestion”.
Now, opponents of a November ballot question are also crying foul.
They’re upset over the preamble wording for the Charter School Commission Amendment.
It reads, “Provides for improving student achievement and parental involvement through more public charter school options.”
How can the preamble say that?
Continue readingThe same people who pushed the failed T-SPLOST tax referendum on the July primary ballot are now pushing the charter school referendum on the November general election ballot. Four of their leaders are the same specific individuals, including one from right here in Lowndes County. They’re pushing something they admit has failed in every other state. Let’s not be the first to fall for it.
According to the
Georgia Charter Schools Association (GCSA),
No other state has had a positive outcome for a charter-positive ballot initiative
So even one of the major proponents of charter schools admits no other state’s voters have thought they were a good idea. Their slides lay out a pair of statewide major money campaigns to push the referendum anyway.
We know about this because these slides fell into the hands of the AJC, and Jim Galloway published them today, saying:
Continue reading
Yesterday morning’s County Commission Work Session
started on time!
In addition to the open records and open meetings items,
it included a report from KLVB, two rezonings, typo fixes and date changes
in the ULDC, a vanity road name change, an alcohol license and an
alcohol ordinance change, a USGS river gauge, surplus vehicles,
purchase of a new fire truck, and more!
They vote on all this tonight at their Regular Session, 5:30 PM.
Here’s
the agenda.
5.a. Unsurprisingly, the County Manager suggested the County Clerk be appointed the Open Records Officer now required by state law. 5.b. They also have a resolution before them about review and approval of minutes of executive sessions, but of course they don’t allow we the taxpayers to see that before they vote on it.
They considered adopting subdivision infrastructure for 5.c. Glen Laurel and 5.d. Crestwood.
6. Videos of the KLVB report and of applicant Emily Macheski-Preston are in a separate blog post.
7. Public Hearings:
Continue reading
Haley Hyatt videoed
yesterday’s Remerton City Council
decision about Strickland Mill.
Citizens pled, unsuccessfully, for it to be saved.
Then the owners made a surprise offer.
Here’s Part 1 of 3:
The final plea
was made by Celine H. Gladwin.
Proponents of the state-forced charter school constitutional amendment
on the November ballot have a
website
that is full of bait and switch.
Most of it is about what they claim are the benefits of charter schools.
But that’s not what the referendum is about.
Local school boards can already authorize charter schools,
and many of them have.
The referendum would change the Georgia Constitution to authorize
an appointed state board to force charter schools on local elected school
boards that don’t want them,
granting more money per student than in public schools,
with
the difference to be made up from local property and sales taxes.
The most substantive thing I have found on the proponents’ website
says that last is not so, but unconvincingly.
Tony Roberts, President of Georgia Charter Schools Association wrote to All Charter School Leaders and Board Members 7 August 2012, Response to Letter from Herb Garrett of Georgia Superintendents Association,
One final, but important point, local school superintendents and board members were adamantly against any local dollars going to charter schools that were denied by a local school board. The final version of HB 797 was negotiated to ensure that was the case — the language is written right there into the law. So, to recap, they insist on no local money going to state-approved charters, and then get upset about the state money going to charters.
Curiously, he doesn’t cite that purported language. The closest thing I can find in HB 797 is a paragraph I already quoted:
Continue reading