Wednesday, May 25, 2011
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Communication between a city school board member and a charter-school operator caused confusion and some bad feelings among the board.
Lock P. Beachum Sr., board president, said an official from Mosaica Education Inc., a charter-school operator, received an email from a board member asking Mosaica to start charter schools in the city. Beachum, however, said he hasn’t seen the email.
Beachum didn’t identify the board member during the regular board meeting Tuesday, but during the board’s caucus, members said it was Anthony Catale.
When the Mosaica official, John Q. Porter, contacted Superintendent Connie Hathorn about it, Hathorn said he didn’t know anything about such a plan, Beachum said. A meeting that had been set up between Catale and Mosaica was canceled this week.
“I’ve been telling people in the community that this board is 100 percent behind the superintendent,” Beachum said. “Evidently, he does not have 100 percent of the board behind him if this is going on.”
Catale, who didn’t attend the meeting because of an accident involving a family member, said in a telephone interview that he contacted a Mosaica representative because he’s heard rumors that Mosaica was going to form charter schools at some city schools and he wanted a meeting with them to determine if that was true.
“Like I tell the public to go to the horse’s mouth, I went to the horse’s mouth,” Catale said.
He said he isn’t advocating the company convert city schools to charter schools and referred to his frequent criticism of charter schools and their drain on public schools’ finances.
Catale said he doesn’t know Porter but contacted another Mosaica official.
“Most recently, I have not been privy to a lot of information,” Catale said of communication with the board.
Beachum said the only person who should be contacting anyone on behalf of the school board is him as board president. If other members want to act individually, it should be clear that they represent themselves and not the board as a whole, he added.