School board rejects charter proposal

Voting unanimously against idea for campus in the district, trustees encourage founders to update, resubmit plan.The Newport-Mesa Unified School District board voted unanimously to reject a proposal for a charter school Tuesday, a day after administrators recommended that members deny the plan.

In November, a group of local educators and residents submitted a plan for the Orange County Academy, a charter campus that would combine home-schooling with classroom instruction. On Monday, a group of Newport-Mesa administrators -- including Supt. Robert Barbot and assistant superintendent of elementary education Susan Astarita -- posted a negative review of the proposal on the district’s website, saying that the charter was vague and failed to answer key questions.

At the Tuesday meeting, with a number of Orange County Academy founders in attendance, the school board ruled the same way, denying the current proposal but encouraging the petitioners to return with a more concise plan.

“I hope you will take a lot of the information from the research that went into this denial and go from there,” board president David Brooks said.

The school, if accepted, would be the first charter campus in Newport-Mesa history. The seven founders, including former Newport-Mesa teacher Jan Luxembourger, proposed a campus at which students would attend class two days a week and study at home the other three days.

Administrators said the charter was vague about how the school would balance home and on-site instruction, and that no plan was provided for training parents to teach to state standards. The group also noted that the petition’s signature sheets did not include addresses, leaving administrators to speculate about how many of the school’s supporters actually lived in Newport-Mesa.

Todd Winkler, the president of the charter school board, said the board’s decision came as no surprise after the district’s Monday report.

“Obviously, it’s disappointing, but we expected a denial of this sort,” he said. The board members “are asking for a lot more requirements than the state does.”

The Orange County Academy already has received a $180,000 start-up grant from the state Department of Education, and Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor and other politicians have voiced support for it. Winkler, who lives in Lake Forest, said his board would either bring an amended charter back to Newport-Mesa or appeal its case to the county.

Mansoor said he hoped that Newport-Mesa would continue to pursue a charter school, citing the high number of campuses in Los Angeles and San Diego counties and the comparatively few in Orange County.

“It seems there’s an unwillingness to make it work,” he said. “If it’s working elsewhere, there’s no reason it can’t work here.”

The Orange County Academy was one of two charter schools set to be discussed at Tuesday’s meeting. The other was the Orange Science Academy, a technology-based campus proposed by the nonprofit Dialog Foundation. However, the foundation withdrew the latter proposal Monday after the district recommended that the school board deny it.

Adnan Doyuran, an administrator for the Dialog Foundation, said his group would amend its plan and bring it back to the school board soon.

“Some of their concerns are reasonable, so we can and we will revise them,” he said. “I would say most of them we can probably negotiate.”

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