The Santa Barbara County Board of Education unanimously voted on April 2 to block an appealed charter petition filed by a group of parents and teachers from Olive Grove Charter School.
The vote aligned with with the county Office of Education’s staff recommendation that the Cuyama Unified School District’s Feb. 19 denial of the petition was made on sound legal ground.
Bill Cirone, the superintendent of Santa Barbara County schools, said the board was placed in a “very awkward” and “heart-wrenching” position, and the decision it made effectively punted the Olive Grove decision on to the California State Board of Education.
“You can appeal it to a higher court,” he urged the tearful mass of teachers, parents, students and supporters who showed up, packing the hearing room in Santa Barbara.
Olive Grove is a charter school based in Los Olivos which offers a blended kindergarten through 12th grade independent study program serving 300 students at five locations scattered across San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties.
In June 2013, the Los Olivos School District’s board voted to downsize the Olive Grove program to a single campus serving 20 kindergarten through eighth grade students. A group of teachers and administrators drew up a modified charter and petitioned neighboring district Cuyama Unified to adopt the campuses slated for closure.
The Santa Barbara Unified School District superintendent threatened to litigate if Cuyama Unified approved the petition, because one of the satellite campuses was allegedly in his district. Cuyama, unable to muster the resources for a protracted legal battle with a district 40 times its size, backpedaled furiously and ultimately voted to deny the Olive Grove petition. The petitioners then appealed the decision to the county Education Office.
Joe Shoulder, counsel for the Board of Education, explained the theory behind the county’s decision by identifying what he called a “bedrock principle” that Olive Grove failed to meet—a school site located within the bounds of Cuyama’s district.
Colin Miller, vice president of policy for the California Charter Schools Association, does not agree with Shoulder’s interpretation of the California Education Code.
“The laws for a non-classroom-based charter school are a little bit different than a school that’s fully site based,” said Miller. “For a non-classroom-based school, there’s a lot of flexibility in the law and a lot of questions about what’s allowable based on where it operates. If a school is completely online, they would still be operating.”
In the case of Olive Grove (an independent study charter), Miller said, there isn’t a provision that mandates a campus to be located in the district where it operates.
“It does not say that you have to have a resource center in the district that you’re authorized,” Miller said. “It says that you have to operate in the district, but it doesn’t say what operating means.”
In his letter threatening litigation against Cuyama, Santa Barbara Unified Superintendent David Cash cited San Diego v. Alpine, a case currently in the appeals process (and thus not a legal precedent) where a charter school was sued for operating within the bounds of another district. As Olive Grove teacher Laura Mudge pointed out in an email to the Sun, however, Olive Grove is a different kind of charter school than Alpine.
“Education code makes a distinction between site-based (students come every day) and independent study charter schools,” she said. “Olive Grove is an independent study program, and education code states we can hold our independent study meetings wherever we wish.”
The San Diego case is distinct, she claimed, because it dealt with “a school that had chartered as a site-based school that tried to operate outside of the authorizing district and when caught, tried to change their program to independent study, even though their charter did not state as much.”
Cuyama’s official denial of the petition didn’t include the litigation threat, and so the county board couldn’t factor it in while considering the appeal. Still, Miller said, it should raise alarm bells for people watching the ongoing struggle.
“You cannot deny a charter school based on the threat of a lawsuit. We are concerned with that precedent,” Miller said.
Paul Phillips, a San Luis Obispo attorney who works in education law, agreed with Miller’s assesment.
“The question becomes whether Olive Grove has standing to say, ‘Hey, Cuyama was pushed in the chest,’ he said.
Cuyama Superintendent Paul Chounet sent a letter to the Education Office that was read during the hearing. The letter said the threat of litigation was the deciding factor in his district’s decision and that his district’s contracted charter attorney considered the Olive Grove petition “one of the better ones she’s seen.”
County Superintendent Cirone expressed confusion over that letter of support, calling it “confusing and honestly contradictory.” He dismissed the threat of litigation as a legitimate factor in Cuyama’s decision.
“You can’t deny based on a legal threat,” he said.
Contact Staff Writer Sean McNulty at [email protected].
