GREENVILLE, Maine — Officials in this community on the fringe of the North Maine Woods want to create an outdoor leadership academy, possibly a charter school that would attract students from throughout the country. It’s a move they see as critical to ensuring the survival of local schools and the town.
While school officials have addressed the concept of such an academy in their strategic plan, they haven’t yet found an avenue to make it happen.
“We want to do more around the line of environmental education, but because of the constraints of state and federal requirements and mandates, we haven’t been able to be as flexible with the program [as] we’d like to be,” Union 60 Superintendent Heather Perry said Wednesday.
Perry said school and municipal officials have explored the possibility of the Greenville schools’ taking on a quasi-private status to allow that flexibility but found too many barriers. They now have shifted their focus to the possibility of creating the state’s first charter school.
A charter school receives public funds but is exempt from certain rules and regulations that apply to public schools. A charter school is given increased flexibility in operations and greater budgetary autonomy in exchange for being held accountable for improved student achievement, according to the Maine Association for Public Charter Schools.
But Maine is one of 10 states in the nation that have no provision for charter schools. More than 1.4 million children are enrolled in more than 4,000 charter schools in the remaining 40 states, according to the association.
Last month, the Maine Senate voted down LD 1438, which would have allowed the creation of charter schools, even though the bill had the support of the state Board of Education, the Maine Department of Education, the governor, the House of Representatives and the Maine PTA, Judith D. Jones, director of the Maine Association for Public Charter Schools, said this week in an e-mail.
Opponents of the bill argued that it would be bad public policy to take money from public schools to try a different approach at a time when municipal budgets are strained.
Supporters say they are not deterred by the defeat. In fact, they add, the support for charter schools is broadening.
“We are already working with many Maine educators and citizens who are ready, willing and able to form new public school options once the enabling legislation is passed, hopefully in the winter of 2010,” Jones said.
The Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone has a specific “charter” from the Legislature, but it’s considered a magnet school and can choose its students, which public charter schools cannot, according to Jones.
“The charter school would allow us to be a little bit more flexible and it would almost operate like an independent school where we could have tuition students from throughout the state and New England,” Perry said.
To offer residents more information, a public forum on charter schools will be held at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 29, in the Greenville High and Middle School library. Jones will be guest speaker.
Another public forum on charter schools is planned at 3 p.m. Monday, Aug. 3, at the Hutchinson Center in Belfast, with Joe Nathan speaking. Nathan, of the University of Minnesota, is one of the founders of the charter school movement in the U.S.
“Without a charter school law, Maine is unlikely to qualify for the $4.3 billion competitive grants available under the ‘Race to the Top’ stimulus funds for public education to be distributed by the U.S. Department of Education next December,” Jones said.
Those funds look appealing to residents in the Moosehead Lake region, who this year will fund all but $164,000 of a $3.4 million school budget. If residents find a charter school to their liking, then local officials will join other supporters throughout the state in a push to persuade elected state officials to support legislation, according to Perry.
The charter school may be just the avenue for the Greenville school system to expand its offerings and to grow the economy, Perry said.
The outdoor learning concept has been around in the Moosehead Lake region for years. Town Manager John Simko wrote about it in an analysis he prepared in 2002 titled “Greenville at the Crossroads: A Dire Need to Grow Our Population and Enrich Our Community.” In that document, Simko said he envisioned an outdoor experimental learning institute as one way to grow the economy.
His concept, he said, was similar to the operations of the Chewonki Foundation in Wiscasset, the Outward Bound Program of Hurricane Island, and Maine Bound at the University of Maine in Orono. Offerings could be held year-round, he suggested, such as canoeing, kayaking, rock climbing and hiking, which could prompt seasonal residents and others to send their children or grandchildren to the Greenville schools.
Such a program could entice people to move to Greenville, according to Simko.
“Certainly we want to make sure that the outdoor education is the framework of the core of our educational institution. We want to use that as our basis to operate everything,” Perry said. She said school officials have discussed possible offerings such as a course in which students could earn a pilot’s license. Anything is possible, Perry said.
“We see it as a way to allow us to continue to exist well into the future,” Perry said.
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