Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
District 55 School Board members, their Oregon State School Boards Association (OSBA) lawyer, People Involved in Education (PIE) board members and their attorney are planning to sit down face to face to discuss a pending contract between the two organizations to start a charter school in Sweet Home.
PIE is negotiating a contract with the district to start the charter school in September. The charter school concept was approved last May, but the district and PIE must negotiate a contract to actually open the school.
During the regular School Board meeting on Monday night, PIE President Jay Jackson told the board he was concerned that PIE had not heard about eight conditions placed on the district?s contract prior to Jan. 4 when the district?s attorney, Peter Dassow of the OSBA, sent a contract proposal to PIE.
Four of the conditions were set by School Board resolution in June, just one month after the board approved PIE?s proposal to create a charter school, Jackson said. Four more conditions were added in the Jan. 4 contract proposal, provisions that are either ?impractical? or ?unnecessary.?
Supt. Larry Horton said that PIE could have drafted a contract proposal and submitted it to the district at any time after the district approved the charter school, and he wanted to know why PIE had not responded with a counter-proposal in the last six weeks.
Dassow told Horton that he had attempted to make contact with PIE attorney John Liljegren five times since submitting the district?s proposal. Horton wanted to know why PIE had not responded to the proposal in the last six weeks.
?You?re painting a picture that makes us look bad,? Horton said. ?We could have responded if he (PIE?s attorney) had turned it around five weeks ago.? He?s tried to get your attorney to contact him and start the negotiation.?
PIE can respond and argue, convince or otherwise negotiate the terms of the contract, including the conditions, Horton told The New Era. ?The whole idea of negotiating a contract is to negotiate a contract.? I would have thought they would have presented a contract early on. They could have.?
?We?ve got a proposal,? Chairman Scott Proctor told Jackson. ?Since then, we?ve been waiting to hear back.?
?One of the first things, I did respond by saying, ?Resolution? What resolution??? Jackson told The New Era. He requested a copy of the June resolution setting four of the conditions from Dassow, who denied it twice. He received a copy from the district secretary.
?Upon getting that, there?s new conditions in that (proposal) that were not brought up in a motion,? Jackson said, a total of eight conditions that PIE had never heard before, 33 weeks after approval of the charter school.
?Once you see these changes, you start looking for whatever else is different,? Jackson said. PIE went through the contract in a process that included Jackson, PIE?s attorney and the PIE Board of Directors. It took six weeks to respond to the district?s proposal.
PIE sent a counter-proposal on Monday, Jackson said. ?For the size and complexity of the contract, it?s not a long time.?
From the time of the initial approval of the charter school, PIE continually has heard that a contract was coming, Jackson said. ?When people say we agree, I assume that?s what they mean. As far as I knew we were still operating on a cooperative basis. I understood, it?s coming along. I guess if I?d known about these deadlines being out there, they would have heard from me.?
Jackson told the School Board that the two lawyers had informally agreed to let Dassow put the first draft proposal together following the May approval.
?Hearing in December that the contract proposal was not yet finished, Jackson told The New Era, it was ?again not a big concern,? with everyone ?all moving in the same direction.?
Jackson started out by telling the district board that OSBA is opposed to charter schools and lobbies against them during legislative sessions.
Essentially, OSBA has told the district to approve the charter school, ?and then we?ll see to it the contract doesn?t happen,? Jackson told The New Era. ?I think part of the difficulty here is the process has been handed off to OSBA.?
From the board?s perspective, board member Jason Redick told The New Era that he has not been happy with the board?s involvement in the process. Redick was not a member of the board when the charter school was approved. He has two children who attend PIE?s Sand Ridge Charter School in the Lebanon School District.
?And I think that?s coming down from the OSBA attorney,? Redick said. ?It?s the ?we?ll handle it? syndrome.?
At least two of the conditions are ?just an obstacle to the contract,? Jackson said. He referred to two that showed up in the Jan. 4 district contract proposal.
The conditions require that that PIE provide a set of current bylaws and articles of incorporation for the PIE-Sweet Home nonprofit independent of any other PIE nonprofit or charter school and that ?in order to avoid possible entanglement issues with the Lebanon School District ? PIE createes a separate board of directors and operate the Sweet Home school as a totally separate entity including all finances and insurances.?
These two requirements mean that PIE will need to create an entirely new nonprofit corporation by Feb. 15, Jackson said, and within six weeks of seeing the district?s first contract proposal.
A new corporation would not be the same one that signs the contract or has the district?s approval to start a charter school.
PIE would not be a party to the contract, Jackson said.
On these two conditions, Hopkins told The New Era. He believes that such a condition means the contract would not apply to the new corporation, but he believes it may be possible for a memorandum of understanding to allow a new corporation to operate the school.
?I?m getting contradictory and impossible signals from the district,? Jackson told the board. The district asks for a response, but PIE cannot if it is not the corporation running the school. ?We don?t even know what conditions we?re supposed to meet.?
Jackson told The New Era he thought Aug. 1 was the deadline for showing that PIE had the ability to open a facility in compliance with state requirements, but another condition requires that PIE do that by March 15.
Adjusting the timelines is something the board can do, board member Leena Neuschwander said during the meeting, but the district needs time to plan before the next school year, to figure out how many teachers it will need.
?We need to know if you?re going to be ready to go,? Neuschwander said. Neuschwander was not on the board when the charter school was approved.
The attorneys should have been working together, Hopkins told the board. It appears a resolution would be extension of timelines.
Hopkins told the board he thought it was important that the boards and attorneys get together to go over the issues. Proctor agreed.
In other business ?
– Ken Roberts told the District 55 School Board that contrary to an article in The New Era last week, ?everything was looking good in the classrooms.?
He wanted to reassure the board that they were not in ?total chaos,? although he was not sure what that meant, referring to the comment of a parent talking about the district?s new 45-minute early release time on Wednesdays.
Roberts spends time in the schools, he said, and ?I think I?m qualified to speak to that.?
– Accepted a grant for some $812,000 over five years to establish a 21st Century Schools Community Learning Center at Foster School. The program will help create a new after-school program.
– Heard a presentation on a proposed health clinic to be established within the School District by Linn County Health Department through a grant program.