BY MARK J. CRAWFORD
Telegraph Editor
A group aiming to convince the school board to allow them to found a charter school in Brooker may first have to convince the county commission to deny a special exception for a daycare.
The former Brooker Elementary School has been empty this year, and community members were hoping to resurrect it as a charter school. They’ve just learned, however, that the school district may allow Love’n and Learning Daycare to lease the property, hence the special exception request that will be heard by county commissioners Thursday, Dec. 16.
The elementary schools in Brooker and Hampton were closed this year over objections from parents and community members to help the district deal with enrollment and budgetary concerns. The schools were consolidated with the two elementary schools in Starke. One of those schools, Southside Elementary, will be replaced with a larger combined elementary and middle school in 2023.
As a charter school, Brooker Community School would operate under a contract with the Bradford County School District, from which it would receive primary funding. With school board approval, applicants would form their own governing board to run the school, which would be free from many regulations imposed on public schools but nevertheless accountable for academic and financial outcomes.
According to Brooker’s Jerome Kelley, the school would instruct children from kindergarten through the sixth grade.
Also important to the people of Brooker — a school there would help solidify the community and promote its growth. People want to move to a community that has a school, Kelley said, and the children raised there continue the tradition.
Children from the Brooker area wouldn’t have to ride the bus so far to go to school, Kelley said, and they would benefit from being at a school with so much community support. It’s true that the district might lose some students to the charter school, but he sees a potential for growth that would end up raising enrollment at the secondary level.
While not necessarily expecting enthusiastic cooperation, the charter school proponents were not expecting competition for the Brooker Elementary building.
Kelley called it “a royal mess” and is frustrated that after months of conversations with school board members and administration that they haven’t been able to secure interest in letting them use the facility, the property for which was donated to public education, and he feels should be used for that purpose.
It wasn’t until Monday that he realized there was a pending special exception application filed by the daycare. After reaching out to the school board and superintendent, Kelley said they’ve received no feedback and knew nothing about a possible plan to lease the school property for that purpose.
“They’ve been having this in the works for some time behind closed doors. I just never thought that I’d see our government officials be so deceptive,” he said.
Kelley also called it an attack on school choice.
“There’s a lot to be cleared up,” he said.
Superintendent Will Hartley said because of the property’s zoning, the daycare applicant must go through the special exception process, but there is no agreement between the school district and the daycare to use the property. There are a lot of hoops to jump through with the state, he said.
“We have had discussions, but nothing’s been agreed on,” Hartley said.
Hartley said he has spoken to several people interested in the charter school as well, but he had not spoken to Kelley. This is how he views it: agreeing to the charter school would take funding from the district’s other schools.
“At the end of the day, really, there’s no difference in doing that, and keeping the school open as it was before, right?” he said.
The number of students at Brooker Elementary wasn’t generating enough state funding to cover the cost of running the school. The charter school would face the same difficulty, Hartley said.
To the superintendent, it makes more sense to lease the facility to a business and generate revenue for the district. That doesn’t stand in the way of a group applying to create a charter school, it just means they won’t be running it on school board property.
“We’ll do everything we can to support the students that are educated there, but it would have never made sense for us to close the school if we were going to turn around and give it to a charter school,” he said.
There is a lot of work and planning that goes into completing a charter school application, a lot the Brooker community would have to prove to win approval. Hartley said he has posed questions about administration, staffing and curriculum that have not been answered. If one day those students are to enter a district-run school, the district needs to make sure they are getting the education they need.
“It’s way, way early in the process. It’s a long way to go for it to be something that’s successful,” Hartley said.
The special exception hearing in front of the Board of Adjustment will begin at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 16. The hearing will take place at the courthouse.
