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Superintendent of Schools James Willis will host a coffee with the superintendent event at 9 a.m. Saturday at the Peekskill Middle School Cafeteria entitled, "Charter Schools And Why We Should Oppose Them."
Charter schools are public schools that are free and open to all students. Charter schools are nonselective and enroll students through a nondiscriminatory admissions lottery. A group in Peekskill has applied to the state to create a charter school at the Assumption Catholic School, which will close at the end of the school year.
Each charter school is governed by a volunteer board of trustees, which typically includes educators, community members who would help guide the school’s operations.
District officials say that if approved by the state, the charter school would pull needed funding from the already strapped district.
“The problem with the way charter schools are funded is that they drain state aid away from the public schools and there’s no possible way to make that up,” Willis said at April’s Board of Education meeting. “It’s a cumulative affect over the years - you add more and more students to the charter schools and it drains more and more and it gets to a point in time where you get no more transitional aid for those students. But we still have to pay for those students.”
Students admitted to the new charter school would get $16,000 a year from the district’s budget per year, even if they weren’t previously district students. The Peekskill schools would be compensated in the first few years for the lost funds but would be down about $6 million after the fifth year.
At least 70 teachers would need to be cut if the district lost that $6 million and sports and arts programs would likely be cut, Willis said.
“We’d certainly be forced to raise taxes,” said school board president Joseph Urbanowicz. “We couldn’t cut $6 million out of the budget and provide an adequate education for anyone.”
Charter schools must follow all the rules that any other New York public school would and are held to the same standards. Backers of the the proposed charter school have stressed that although it would be housed in a building owned by the Church of the Assumption Catholic parish, it would not be religion-based but would feature a “values-based curriculum.”
Peekskill Common Council member Marybeth McGowan said she was skeptical of the charter school plan and said she would be attending Saturday's meeting to better understand, both as a resident and as a representative of the city and urged other residents to attend.
"I don't see the benefit of a charter school," McGowan said. "If the state board of education believes the charter schools are better than public schools, then why aren't we running our public schools like charter schools?"
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