Public charter schools; applications, review and approval. (HB344)
Introduced By
Del. Glenn Davis (R-Virginia Beach) with support from co-patron Del. Wendell Walker (R-Lynchburg)
Progress
✓ |
Introduced |
✗ |
Passed Committee |
☐ |
Passed House |
☐ |
Passed Senate |
☐ |
Signed by Governor |
☐ |
Became Law |
Description
Public charter schools; applications; review and approval. Permits the Board of Education (the Board) to receive, review, and rule upon applications for public charter schools and enter into agreements for the establishment of public charter schools. Under current law, the power to grant or deny a public charter school application and enter into an agreement for the establishment of a public charter school rests solely with local school boards. The bill also provides that the decision of the Board or a local school board to grant or deny a public charter school application or to revoke or fail to renew a public charter school agreement is final and is not subject to appeal. Current law contains an appeal process for such decisions. Read the Bill »
Outcome
History
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| 01/11/2022 | Committee |
| 01/11/2022 | Prefiled and ordered printed; offered 01/12/22 22101742D |
| 01/11/2022 | Referred to Committee on Education |
| 01/19/2022 | Impact statement from DPB (HB344) |
| 01/26/2022 | Assigned Education sub: Early Childhood/Innovation |
| 02/08/2022 | House committee, floor amendments and substitutes offered |
| 02/15/2022 | Left in Education |
Comments
I encourage legislators to vote NO on this bill. I lived in Detroit for a number of years and as a parent experienced firsthand the confusing and disjointed world of charters schools. The city had both public schools, charter schools, and private schools. We like to think that it is empowering to give parents more choices but in actuality this system created a confusing hodgepodge of schools that only made the process of sending your child to school more stressful. Geographically some areas of the city were served by multiple different schools or did not have enough schools. The most common experience was to have a charter school open to great fanfare and publicity only to have it fail and close within a few years. A full two years before my son was going to start kindergarten I joined an online group of parents to "educate" myself about the best school to send my son to. This turned into two years spent traveling to different parts of the city, visiting one school after another, most of which had no track record so as a parent you were constantly trying to make a decision based on some kind of gut instinct. The public school system in the city, already experiencing many problems, was continuously hollowed out by the charter school movement. 10 years on the city is in no better place and the money wasted on charter schools would have been better used by being reinvested into the public school system. There existed some success stories but for the number of schools that still have their doors open is definitely outnumbered by the number of schools that closed, School closures put parents back to square one about where to send their children and took an emotional toll on the children themselves when they were displaced from their schools, teachers, and friends. We moved to northern Virginia to be in a stable school district where we knew that we would be able to enroll our son in the nearest public school and not have to spend months and months searching where he should go. My son is in 6th grade now and there are charter schools that I visited in Detroit when my son started kindergarten that have already closed down. I urge you to vote NO on this bill. Focus should remain on maintaining and funding a stable, robust public school district that invests in teachers, children, and schools.