Board of Public Education approves first wave of Montana charter schools

Montana’s Board of Public Education unanimously approved applications for 19 new charter schools across the state Friday, giving the 11 public school districts that submitted them the green light to proceed with standing up the new institutions.

The new charters represent Montana’s first wave of schools made possible by House Bill 549, which was passed by the Legislature last year and allows existing public school boards to set up and manage charter schools with narrowly tailored educational goals. The approved charters will see new schools established in Billings, Great Falls, Helena, Kalispell, Missoula, Bozeman, Frenchtown, East Helena, Hamilton, Boulder and Corvallis.

“This has been a learning process for all of us,” board chair Tim Tharp said following a round of applause after Friday’s vote. “I’m going to be the first to admit we did not do it perfectly, and we have received critique and criticism on the process. We were handed this from the Legislature with a very, very tight time frame, and folks around the table as well as partners all stepped up and provided a great deal of assistance.”

Included on the list of approvals are a pair of charters expanding existing district programs in Bozeman, a charter aimed at serving multilingual students in Billings, a charter focused on career-based education in Hamilton, and a charter dedicated to teacher recruitment and retention in the Great Falls school system. Approved charters will receive state funding through the same mechanisms as existing public schools, including portions of the funding formula allocated on a per-pupil basis, and basic entitlements issued on a per-school basis.

Jane Lee Hamman, who chairs the board’s public charter school subcommittee, told fellow members Friday that Gov. Greg Gianforte’s office plans to set the per-school entitlement rate for new charter schools for the coming fiscal year.

State board members have reviewed a total of 26 charter proposals submitted under the new public district charter school law in recent months. One proposal was rejected early in the process as the applicants had not consulted their local school board, and another was withdrawn by the applicants Friday just prior to the board’s action. The board denied five other proposals in a separate vote Friday.

Among the proposals denied by the board Friday were two charters aimed at offering elementary students in Kalispell more flexibility to mix in-person classes with online and homeschool instruction, and a charter designed to resolve ongoing challenges with public school services on Hutterite colonies in north-central Montana. The latter did fuel considerable debate among board members Thursday, with several acknowledging that the issues the proposed charter sought to tackle require a more robust discussion among lawmakers, local education officials and colony representatives.

“If we were to grant this, it would say, ‘Okay, these colony schools, or these groups of students, we’re just taking them away from the responsibility that the district that they are in has to those students.’ Is this the wrong solution to a very real problem?” Tharp said. He added that he believes the issue may perhaps be better suited for a separate community choice school commission established by Montana’s other new charter school bill, House Bill 562, which creates a separate system of “community choice” schools overseen by their own boards and not subject to the bulk of Montana education laws.

The first round of applications for public charter schools under HB 549 generated dozens of comments from public education advocates, parents and community members, some supporting certain proposals and some opposing others.

The Frontier Institute, a Helena-based free-market think tank, weighed in urging broader caution in the process. President and CEO Kendall Cotton wrote that in approving any of the proposed charters, the board “recognizes the promise of an applicant to deliver higher quality performance than the status quo in Montana public schools.” Cotton added that his organization is “deeply concerned” about a perceived lack of detail in many of the applications favored by the board, and called on members to develop standard practices for measuring the effectiveness of new charter schools.

Thursday’s discussion also revealed a number of higher-level dilemmas board members have faced in their first bid at implementing district-run charters. One such pain point involved legal questions about the ability of charters to offer online enrollment and instruction for students outside their district’s boundaries. Hamman noted Montana law currently contains several contradictory provisions related to out-of-district enrollment that could raise legal issues for charters built around widespread online instruction. Even so, board members were reluctant to rule such proposals out.

“I believe that legal clarity on those needs to be sought out, and I think that we can still approve them and that can happen afterward,” said board member Susie Hedalen. “I do not believe that is our job, to determine the legality, since it’s not clear in the legislation.”

Hedalen, a Republican, is currently campaigning to be the state superintendent of public instruction.

Board members also wrestled with the more existential question of what one of HB 549’s primary charges — that charters offer “innovative” instruction — actually means, with Hamman quipping that one proposal had her turning to “the dictionary and thesaurus” to better define the term. The board had rated several proposals expanding pre-existing programs in certain districts as lower in terms of their innovative appeal, but rated similar charter applications in districts where such programs hadn’t been tried yet as higher. Despite those ratings, board member Anne Keith pointed out some applications built around pre-existing district programs had fallen higher on the board’s ranking list than others proposing the same model of instruction.

“I don’t know what the distinguishing factors are to the ones that we approve and the ones that we don’t, that’s where I’m struggling,” Keith said, referencing the parallels between several higher-ranked proposals and one from Billings to use remote instruction to help struggling students. “Billings Opportunity, convince me why it’s less worthy than the other ones that we’ve approved that are a very similar model.”

The board expressed particular concern over a charter proposal submitted by the Park City Schools, which involved administering online instruction with the aid of a for-profit vendor, Pearson Online and Blended Learning. That detail — coupled with the proposal’s projected long-term enrollment of more than 1,000 students statewide — prompted several board members to question the charter’s potential impacts on enrollment in other districts throughout Montana. 

The Park City charter was slated for inclusion on the list of proposed denials Friday. However, Superintendent Dan Grabowska submitted a letter to the board prior to its vote voluntarily withdrawing the application. Grabowska appeared before the board in person to defend the proposal and tell members that the district would be submitting a revised application during the next public charter application window this summer.

Also during its two-day meeting this week, the Board of Public Education examined a range of other issues facing Montana’s K-12 school system. Members approved advancing a new set of regulations to the Secretary of State’s office governing a new early childhood literacy program, passed by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers last year. They received a string of updates from state agencies including the Department of Labor and Industry, which informed members it had staff on the ground in Heart Butte to assist teachers rendered jobless by a large-scale layoff this month, and the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, which reiterated concerns raised by DLI about ongoing challenges in data sharing with the Office of Public Instruction. OCHE oversees Montana’s university system and noted that it is altering its approach to collecting information on dual college course enrollment among high schoolers to resolve the data issues.

Members also got a look at the latest totals of teachers licensed by OPI for the 2023-24 school year. Crystal Andrews, the agency’s director of accreditation and licensure, told the board the number of new educator licenses issued this academic year was 246 higher than in the 2022-23 school year — a promising development in a state contending with ongoing teacher recruitment and retention challenges. Andrews added that 28 licensed educators in Montana obtained an additional endorsement last year to teach special education. Given the state’s critical shortage of teachers dedicated to instructing students with special needs, Andrews said, “that is really hopeful.”

Alex Sakariassen is a reporter for the Montana Free Press, a Helena-based nonprofit newsroom, and can be reached at asakariassen@montanafreepress.org. To read the article as originally published, click here.