School Board gets cold feet on charters

Add comment June 23rd, 2009

I was wondering when the Rockford School Board would get cold feet on charter schools. It approved three of them in a rather routine manner, then, Tuesday night, reversed course and voted down GreenTek, 5-1, and voted down Sigma Beta in a 3-3 tie.

The board has a past history with Comprehensive Community Solutions, the folks who sponsored GreenTek. They tried to get a charter school started several years ago and the board voted them down; the case went all the way to the state board of education, which agreed with the local board.

The real disappointment to me was the rejection of Sigma Beta, a school designed by renowned local educator Patrick Hardy to reach hard-to-educate urban youth, particularly boys.

The strangeness of it all has to do with the board’s approval of the same Patrick Hardy as the district’s chief education officer, directly under new Superintendent LaVonne Sheffield. Maybe Hardy can begin to implement some of his concepts in the context of his new position.

And where was Bob Evans? The longtime school board member was, according to the rrstar.com story, in he midst of a five-week course at Rockford College, where he’s a professor. That’s a long time to be away from the board. His constituents were ill-served, as were all the residents of District 205.

Whether or not Evans would have voted to approve Sigma Beta, we don’t know. But his absence was sorely missed.