When the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education grants a school charter, the Commonwealth incurs millions of dollars in start-up costs. For a period of three years, per-pupil aid for students attending the charter school is paid to both the host district and the new school. I've heard the amount of this additional cost for the proposed Gloucester Community Arts Charter School estimated at $5 million.
The process by which the Board evaluated and granted this charter appears to have been flawed. These flaws have been overshadowed by the disclosure of Secretary Paul Reville's email thanking Mitchell Chester, his Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, for overruling the Department of Education's independent evaluators who did not recommend granting the charter. Secretary Reville explained that he needed this charter in order to further his political agenda (it's a clear, concise piece of writing that could serve as a model in a high school English class). In hindsight, his email may serve to explain some of the procedural shortcomings in the approval process.
At least two of those apparent procedural flaws call into question the legitimacy of the granting of the charter: the failure of any Board member to attend the public hearing on the application, and the Board's subsequent retroactive waiver of that attendance requirement. I invite readers to peruse 603 C.M.R. 1.03(2) of the education regulations, and see if you can explain how this regulation pertaining to charter school boards of directors, which the Board cited, gives it the authority to retroactively waive an important procedural requirement that it failed to satisfy.
A group of community members is organizing to demand our Government officials treat the trust we have placed in them with respect. What are the steps we need to take in order to tell this story before a judge, who can then evaluate whether this Board has fulfilled the requirements the Legislature established or should be stopped from spending millions of our scarce education dollars? Where do we go? What papers need to be filed?
The section of Massachusetts law that seems relevant is below...
I am not an attorney, which is why I am asking if concerned readers of Blue Mass Group may have some experience to share.
Massachusetts General Law reads as follows:
Chapter 29: Section 63. Unlawful exercise or departments abuse of power; commonwealth, commissions, officers, etc.; court restraint
If a department, commission, board, officer, employee or agent of the commonwealth is about to expend money or incur obligations purporting to bind the commonwealth for any purpose or object or in any manner other than that for and in which such department, commission, board, officer, employee or agent has the legal and constitutional right and power to expend money or incur obligations, the supreme judicial or superior court may, upon the petition of not less than twenty-four taxable inhabitants of the commonwealth, not more than six of whom shall be from any one county, determine the same in equity, and may, before the final determination of the cause, restrain the unlawful exercise or abuse of such right and power.
