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ORS 338.035 states that the proposal must be submitted to the school district within which the public charter school will be located. This puts a damper on our plans to approach the Lowell School District for sponsorship. If receiving sponsorship from Lowell forces our school to physically operate within their boundaries we might want to think of a different district. Real estate within their boundaries is very scarce and I would prefer to operate in an area with more options. This puts our strategy for ensuring all of the kids within our community get enrolled at risk. I don’t believe their will be a way to ensure admittance if we partner with another district.

The proposal must be submitted to the sponsoring school district at least 120 days prior to the date upon which the charter school would begin operating. If we wanted to open on 9/3/2013 we would need to submit our proposal on 5/6/2013.

We don’t have to have our federal nonprofit determination letter when we open. We just have to have submitted our application.

One or more, but not all, schools in a school district may be become a public charter school. A school in a school district that is composed of only one school may become a public charter school.

An approval cannot be given to a charter school proposal that authorizes the conversion of any private school that is tuition based to a public charter school.

Buses – I confirmed today in ORS 338.145 that charter schools are responsible for providing transportation to students who reside within the school district and attend the charter school. This is to bad. I had hoped we could require the parents to drive their children to school. I feel that the transportation of students to school is the parents responsibility. One thing we might be able to do is to provide this option, but explain to parents the cost saving benefits of not utilizing this service.

Food – It is not mandatory for a charter school to operate a Federal Child Nutrition program. Additionally it is not mandatory for a school district that sponsors a Federal Child Nutrition Program to offer the program in it’s charter school. A charter school may operate its own nutrition program without federal reimbursement, in which case there is no State and Federal program requirements. This is great news. Nothing frustrated me more than when my wife and I would make our daughter breakfast and then she would go to school and eat breakfast #2 consisting of sugar cereal or a microwaveable french toast sticks. Schools exist to teach children not feed them. I’d be really interested to see the dollar amount that the large food corporations paid lobbyists to persuade Congress to put the Federal Child Nutrition Program in place. Well enough of that rant 🙂

 Our facility – The facility we choose must conform to the following:

• ADA compliant
• Section 504 compliant
• Insured
• Meet all health and safety codes of the county and or city
• Meet the federal asbestos management requirements for school buildings

Special Education – We cannot adopt practices that screen out children with disabilities or otherwise treat children with disabilities differently than children without disabilities.

My goal in starting this charter is to provide a quality education to the children in the community I live in. I was a little hesitant and worried because I thought that there wouldn’t be a way for us to guarantee that all of the children in our community who wanted to attend could get in. If the number of applying students exceeds the cap you’ve set for your enrollment you have to conduct a lottery and not everyone would get in.

The strategy to prevent this is to set our initial enrollment cap to be the number of K-8 grade students in the Lowell School District boundaries. This wouldn’t be the actual enrollment at Lowell. It would be the number of children living in the boundaries. We then limit our enrollment to kids residing in the Lowell School District boundaries.