State Seeks New Charter School Ruling

Cherokee Charter Academy’s hope for opening as planned this fall does not rest solely with the Cherokee County Board of Education.

Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens and a group of three state-commissioned charter schools filed separate motions Thursday that ask the state Supreme Court to reconsider its 4-3 decision toppling the 2008 Georgia Charter Schools Commission Act.

The state’s motion is “an effort to protect the rights of Georgia students to have a say in their education and be placed in a school that meets their needs,” Olens said in a statement. “I hope the court will accept the arguments presented in our brief and reconsider their decision.”

That May 16 decision, overturning a Fulton County court’s ruling, found that the Georgia Constitution gives local school boards exclusive control of education and that the one exception specified in the Constitution, “special schools,” applies only to schools addressing special needs, such as schools for the blind or the deaf.

That ruling removed the authority to fund charter schools approved by the state commission, rather than local school boards. It affected 16 schools, including Cherokee Charter, which planned to open in August with 900 students.

The charter school is seeking approval from the county Board of Education, which has rejected its petition in the past. That effort gives the academy its best chance to open as planned, but the motions sent to the Supreme Court on Thursday give the school another chance.

Olens filed one motion on behalf of the Georgia Department of Education, the Georgia Charter Schools Commission and state School Superintendent John Barge.

The second motion came lawyer Bruce Brown of Atlanta firm McKenna Long & Aldridge on behalf of Ivy Preparatory Academy in Peachtree Corners, Charter Conservatory for Liberal Arts & Technology in Statesboro and Heron Bay Academy in Locust Grove.

The Supreme Court frequently receives but rarely grants motions to reconsider its rulings, and even the granted motions rarely result in a reversal, The Associated Press reported in an article carried by the Macon Telegraph. That report said charter school advocates call the motions a “Hail Mary.”

BJ Van Gundy, a Peachtree Corners resident who serves on the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, told Peachtree Corner-Berkeley Lake Patch.

The Brown motion challenges the finding that local school districts have exclusive control or authority over education, according to a report from the Georgia Charter Schools Association. The motion also warns of unintended consequences if the ruling shifts the entire burden for education through 12th grade onto local school districts, which are dependent on state funding and follow state directives on curriculum and most other operations.

That motion and the Olens filing also warn that the court’s narrow definition of “special”—essentially, filling a need that local school districts can’t meet—would eliminate all special schools in Georgia because regular public schools now provide all the services special-needs students require.

Instead, Olens argues that the current Georgia Constitution, enacted in 1983, specifically removed limitations from the definition of “special schools” and that the Georgia General Assembly has the privilege to determine whether a school is special and worthy of state support.

“Simple disagreement over policy is an insufficient reason to read in such a limited definition,” the Olens motion reads.

“The unprecedented notion that ‘local school systems have exclusive authority over K-12 public education” is the lynchpin of the Court’s holding. It is the grounds on which the General Assembly’s power to create ‘special schools’ is supposedly limited, for to create such schools would supposedly trod on local authority. But the mere fact that the Constitution expressly allows for the creation of ‘special schools’ removes any claim for exclusivity in local authority,” that motion says.

Olens wrote that the Georgia Constitution does not use the word “exclusive” in its provisions on public education. “Until this Court ruled May 16, no provision of the Constitution, no statute, and no ruling of this or any other Georgia court granted local systems exclusive authority over K-12 public education.”

The legal battle over charter schools has brought up the painful history of segregation.

The majority ruling May 16 cited the state’s 1877 Constitution, which gave local school boards the sole power to create public schools through high school. But Douglas Blackmon noted in a column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday that the same provision in 1877 specified separate public schools for black and white children.

Both the Brown and Olens motions to reconsider delve into Georgia’s century of segregation and the role of the state government in encouraging and breaking down that system.

In addition to the motion to reconsider, the attorney general filed a motion to stay the high court’s May 16 ruling until it acts on the motion to reconsider.

The court has no schedule to act on the motions. The Olens motions and the May 16 ruling are attached to this article as PDF files.

A longer-term hope for charter school advocates is legislative action to amend the state Constitution. A legislative committee is meeting next Friday at the state Capitol to address the Supreme Court’s ruling.