April 18, 2007

Mosier to see draft of charter
School board will review district proposal Thursday

By ED COX
of the Chronicle

     More than once, the lights threatened to go out on charter talks between Mosier Community School and North Wasco County School District at Thursday’s school board meeting — both literally and figuratively.
     At one point, after a switching snafu was nearly resolved in Dry Hollow Elementary’s gymnasium, a building janitor unintentionally turned off one of the main overhead lamps, leaving the board in near-darkness.
     That may or may not have inspired board member Brian Stahl’s later expression — “O-dark 30” — to describe the lateness of the negotiating hour at which the Mosier school board was bringing new, proposed changes to the table.
“Why are we talking about this now?” Stahl asked about one of the 15 modifications suggested to the district board just hours before its meeting. “Why are we seeing it now?”
     But the lights came back on — and after about three hours of public testimony, discussion and voting, the efforts yielded the fruit that had been promised.
     That was a board-approved draft of a new charter, which the directors voted 6-1 (with Ernie Blatz opposed) to forward to the Mosier school board for consideration.
     Depending on the Mosier board’s response, that draft will either cap — or mark a first main parenthesis in — a now month-long process of negotiations between the two sides. The talks have followed the district board’s February decision not to renew the current charter.
     That process has included three public negotiation meetings, at least two private sessions between attorneys and staff for both sides, and an even longer discussion at a previous board meeting.
     At Thursday’s meeting, the district board considered new language that had come out of the negotiation sessions and — somewhat reluctantly — heard extensive testimony from Mosier school board principal Carole Schmidt on the changes that were being requested.
     Schmidt — whose remarks were punctuated by bursts of applause from the largely Mosier-based audience — said her board was had just the previous night found some discrepancies between the working draft the district board was considering and the Mosier board’s understanding of the what it had agreed to.
     District counsel Jason Corey, who prepared the draft, said the only differences from earlier ones was language that had been discussed at the last negotiating meeting and three new changes the district was proposing.
     He objected that Mosier’s proposed changes, in most cases, went back to language either agreed upon early in the negotiations, already in the present charter, or originally proposed by Mosier’s own negotiating team.
     Saying it was possible the Mosier team had missed something among so many drafts, Schmidt offered a pre-emptory apology: “We’re a bunch of amateurs. We have a volunteer attorney. We’re sorry; we’re doing the best we can.”
     More than half of Mosier’s requests related to what Schmidt and her board see as an excessive amount of information the school must provide the district. Schmidt circulated a list of some 50 separate reporting obligations the school would have under the contract.
     “Our concern is trying to limit the amount of things we’re responsible for, while focusing on [education],” Schmidt said.
     “It’s not all just about in-class instruction,” noted Rich Cohn-Lee, an Oregon City lawyer and charter school law expert that the district has retained alongside Corey. “There is a certain amount of administrative component that has to occur.”
Schmidt seemed intent on keeping that component manageable, just as she and the Mosier board insisted on protecting the confidentiality of the school’s waiting list — a topic which generated considerable discussion.
     District superintendent Candy Armstrong stressed that the list need not be made public but would have to be shared with the district, the school’s sponsoring body.
     “Why does the district not trust us?” Schmidt asked. “Why do they need the waiting list?”
     At stake from Mosier’s perspective is the ability of its board to dictate policy and of its administration to fill empty spots at the school as needed. For the district, it’s about effective oversight and safeguarding against a running concern that the school might fill up with students from Hood River County.
     The district board took pains to limit that possibility by approving language capping out-of-district admissions at 20 percent of class enrollment — unless the district authorizes a higher percentage in writing.
     In the event that authorization is sought, Schmidt hoped to obligate the district to a seven-day response time — with the authorization deemed granted if it fails to respond.
     However, the board balked at this “drop-dead language” despite Schmidt’s insistence that the admissions process required a rapid response.
     “You have to balance your need for a quick answer ... against the district’s interest that it’s making its decisions with full knowledge and consent,” Cohn-Lee told her.
     In a concession to Mosier hammered out in an earlier negotiations meeting, the board allowed admissions priorities to stand for all returning students — present and future, out of district and in — and their siblings.
     The district board also acceded to a Mosier request that income and expense reports be required once a quarter rather than monthly. Board member PK Swartz said the monthly requirement seemed, to him, “almost like micromanaging.”
     Armstrong had earlier insisted on the monthly reporting, saying that the district has “some real concerns” about the ongoing viability of the Mosier school.
Those concerns, she said, center around a draft budget that was recently submitted to the district that shows $0 in fundraising income projected for 2007-2008. The school also seems to be “paying down” a cash carryover from year to year with no plans to replenish it.
     Noting the lack of an ending fund balance, Armstrong said, “At the end of the year [2007-2008], they’re not going to have any money left,” according to the draft budget.
     “We stand by our auditor’s report,” Schmidt said, to applause, at Thursday’s meeting. The most recently completed audit, for 2004-2005, shows the school with $200,000 in assets, a 350 percent increase from the previous year.
     A further point of discussion was language describing “financial instability,” which is one of the grounds on which the district can terminate the charter.
     The district board agreed it might consider reports by an independent auditor in determining said instability but turned a deaf ear to the request by Mosier school treasurer Laurie Stephens that one of the indicators of in stability — school expenses exceeding revenues two years in a row — be changed to three years.
     “You often can’t correct those issues in two years,” Stephens said.
District board member Ron Stephens noted that the words “may include” in the charter language give the board the discretion to consider that information but do not obligate it to do so.
     The district board ratified its intent to pay the school 80 percent of state per-student funding, the minimum required by law. Mosier had asked for an extra five percent to help pay for a reading program threatened by the possible loss of Title I funding.
     Mosier board chair Brian McCormick characterized the outcome of the April 12 meeting as “an ungenerous contract from a pretty dysfunctional process.”
Even so, he said he thinks his board, which will discuss the district-approved draft at its 7 p.m. meeting Thursday at the Mosier school, may be able to live with it.
     Still, he said he is concerned that all the “tiny” record-keeping requirements may be setting the school up for another list of non-compliance issues like the one that accompanied the board’s non-renewal decision.
     “If this happens again, I’m not sure what we’ll do,” he said. “We’re as dependent on the goodwill of the district as ever. A contract should be a place where you get a little added safety, and that’s not what we’ve been handed.”