Alliance takes aim at statewide benefit charters
State Board revised its findings in May; budget clouds picture over AB 3632 services
Published: July 1, 2011
The long-running controversy over statewide benefit charters continued at the State Board of Education’s last meeting, when it adopted “material revisions” to the authority it had granted Aspire Public Schools Inc. in 2007 to open statewide benefit charter schools under the State Board’s oversight.
CSBA and its Education Legal Alliance filed suit against Aspire’s statewide benefit charter then, and they will press their case at a hearing before the 1st District Court of Appeal in September. The appellate court ruled for the Alliance a year ago, when it found that the State Board had no evidence that Aspire’s statewide charter provides “instructional services of a statewide benefit” or that those services cannot be provided under a series of locally approved charters, as the statute authorizing statewide benefit charters requires.
“We read the Court of Appeal’s decision as effectively holding that the [State Board’s January 2007 issuance of Aspire’s charter] was legally invalid. We thus do not believe SBE had the authority to ‘materially revise’ the Aspire petition … because its approval of the Aspire petition was invalid to begin with,” explained Richard Miadich, an attorney with the Sacramento law firm of Olson, Hagel & Fishburn who has represented the Alliance in the case.
In what Miadich called a “pretty circular” rationale, the materially revised findings adopted by the State Board May 11 focused on fiscal and economic issues. Aspire persuaded the board that its statewide benefit charter gave it access to bond financing and economies of scale.
To CSBA and the Alliance, the real issues with statewide benefit charters are governance and accountability. As CSBA Senior Policy Consultant Stephanie Medrano Farland explained, “The concern is that charter petitioners will bypass local educational agencies in an attempt to avoid local oversight and move straight to the State Board, where local accountability doesn’t exist.”
AB 3632 services
In another recent case, the state Supreme Court last month declined to hear the Alliance’s appeal of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s move last October to strike funding from the state’s 2010–11 budget to provide mental health services for special education students under Assembly Bill 3632. The Alliance and others had challenged the governor’s use of the line-item veto and his related declaration that he was suspending the mandate to provide the services; both the funding authority and the ability to mandate the services rested exclusively with the state Legislature, advocates argued.
Gov. Jerry Brown favors reinstatement of the funding and the mandate in 2011–12, although he would shift the responsibility from county health departments to schools. Funding was included in a budget package approved by legislative Democrats, but the state budget remained unresolved at press time.