Another glimpse into Ohio’s lax oversight of charter schools

The Liberty Board of Education’s experience with two “conversion schools,” essentially charter schools that were operated by a public school district, provide an insight into an inherent lack of oversight that has plagued far too many of Ohio’s experiments in alternative education.

This week, the first good news about what had been the Liberty Early Academic Resource Nest and Liberty Exemplary Academic Design schools came from the Portage County Educational Services Center, the current sponsor of the schools.

Cheryl Emrich, the executive director at Portage County ESC, says the center has located and created an inventory for educational materials, including iPads and iPod Touches, that LEARN and LEAD received through state or federal grants while operating in Liberty. An inventory has been submitted to the Ohio Department of Education Community Schools Division.

That material was removed from Liberty Township over the objections of Liberty Superintendent Stan Watson who noted at the time that no inventory was being documented as a truck was being loaded. He wrote a letter in March to state officials demanding accountability for the equipment.

Details, details

So, can everyone now rest easy, at least as far as the fate of this equipment is concerned? Well, not exactly.

Alec Brown, a board member for the conversion school that operated for a short time in Doylestown after leaving Liberty, says Liberty still has equipment that belongs to the conversion schools.

“How would they possibly know?” Watson asked. “There’s no inventory. There’s no reconciliation.”

That’s a logical question and logical observation by Watson. But as we have long observed and commented upon a number of times in other editorials, logic is something that has long been missing from Ohio’s overly aggressive entry into the charter school movement.

More than a decade ago, the first charter schools were billed as an experiment in providing competition for the state’s public schools, especially the failing ones.

But legislators in Columbus never waited for the results of the experiment to be documented before approving successive expansions. Like the people running LEARN and LEAD, they couldn’t be bothered taking the time to do a proper inventory.

It didn’t have to be that way, and we believe that history will show that while some states have been able to improve student outcomes through solid charter school programs, Ohio will be a state that wasted billions of dollars on a largely ideological conviction that anything is better than public schools. More tragically, a generation of students will have entered kindergarten and graduated from high school in less time than it will take for Columbus to learn from its mistakes.