A Lesson in Hard Knocks as Charter School Closes

IDYLLWILD, Calif. —  This mountain town, where artists and intellectuals dwell among the pines, started the school year with lofty plans to teach teenagers by harnessing the community’s collective brainpower.

Instead, Idyllwild has learned a bitter lesson of its own: A charter school meant to spare students a lengthy bus ride down the hill to the nearest public high school has collapsed under an avalanche of administrative troubles.

Officials with the public school district based in the neighboring valley city of Hemet say the founders of Idyllwild Charter High School broke the law by opening without proper teacher credentials, staff fingerprints and other basics. Efforts to correct those errors came too late, and the district board last week upheld an earlier decision to revoke the school’s charter. The school will close Friday.

“These are educated people who agreed to a charter and knowingly violated it and have not been able to fix it,” said Hemet Unified School District Supt. Stephen Teele. “So do I have confidence in these people to operate it? No.”

The school board’s decision shattered charter school officials, parents and students, who pleaded for one more chance. “It’s just a shame that they really didn’t give us an opportunity,” said Phyllis Kirchner, whose 16-year-old daughter, Jenny, attended the school.

Only 6 Schools Have Faced Loss of Charters

Permitted by the California Charter School Act of 1992, charter schools are intended to encourage innovation by relaxing the strict requirements governing ordinary public schools, said Colin Miller, education consultant to the charter schools office of the California Department of Education.

Since the law took effect in 1993, 300 schools have formed, but only six have faced revocation of their charters, mainly for administrative deficiencies, he said, calling that risk the price of freedom.

Idyllwild welcomed the new school with high hopes last September. Three instructors, with graduate degrees in education, literature and law, would shepherd 50 students through a course in experiential learning, in classrooms wired for the Digital Age.

It seemed the perfect solution for this town of 2,000. The new school would reflect Idyllwild’s artsy and outdoorsy character, afford one-on-one instruction and allow parents and other residents to join a community adventure in education.

The adventure quickly became an ordeal. The school opened without books, much less high-tech equipment. The teachers, whose academic achievements exceeded California requirements, nonetheless lacked teaching credentials, and got lost in a maze of paperwork trying to obtain them.

Staff fingerprinting fell through the cracks, and insurance requirements went unmet.

“There were clearly some things where we were simply naive,” said Geoffrey Caine, who co-founded the school with his wife and professional partner, Renate, a professor emeritus of education at Cal State San Bernardino.

The Caines, who jointly write and lecture on education, conceived of a high school where traditional classroom lessons would be enriched with the expertise of local professionals. An Idyllwild-based sound engineer offered a class in “the physics of sound.” A local musical group formed a vocal ensemble at the school.

Although the town houses an award-winning public elementary and middle school, the only other high school in town is the private Idyllwild Arts Academy, where admission is selective and tuition for non-boarding students is nearly $16,000 a year.

So most teenagers must attend Hemet High School, a 45-minute bus ride and a world away, in cultural terms. Children rise at 4 or 5 a.m. to catch the bus, and arrive home a little before dinner time, parents complain.

As a result, many families leave town when their children reach high school age. “It’s a drain on the community,” said charter board member David Lilieholm, whose two children attend the elementary school.

Jenny Kirchner, who attended the charter school for her sophomore year, fell ill with mononucleosis during her freshman year at Hemet, and attributes it to exhaustion from the commute. The Idyllwild Charter School, she said, “made a tremendous difference.”

“I never wanted to go to school,” she said. “I hated it. I had panic attacks since kindergarten.” At Idyllwild Charter High, “for once I wanted to go to school,” Jenny said.

Teacher Cecilia Jackson, who holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and a master’s degree in education, said many other students blossomed, grasping subjects they had struggled with before. “We had miracles every day,” she said.

‘It Was Overwhelming,’ One Teacher Says

Despite its promise, however, the school was clouded by problems. “There were only three of us on faculty and we started with nothing, started from scratch,” said teacher Lisa Ezzard, who taught language arts, French, government and dance. “It was overwhelming.”

Ezzard holds a graduate degree in comparative literature and had taught at Southern California junior colleges and the French University of Bordeaux, but neither she nor the other instructors held California teaching credentials.

The three applied for emergency credentials, but said their packets were returned unprocessed. Attempts to resubmit them also failed, they said. Staff fingerprinting, a basic safety check, baffled administrators.

School officials hoped to connect online to a wealth of learning resources, but their first venture into technology--a computerized attendance system--failed and the company that sold the system went bankrupt, sticking the school with the bill.

Supplemental liability insurance required by the Pine Cove Water District, which leased space for the school, proved prohibitively expensive. At $14,000 a year, it would have consumed more than 7% of the school’s $191,000 annual budget.

School officials acknowledged that they had little experience running a school and were stumped by the obstacles they faced.

“None of us thought our teachers would go through the nightmare of credentialing bureaucracy that they did,” said charter school board President Jeanine Stocks, whose 16-year-old son attended class there last year.

School officials notified the district of these problems in November, and gave assurances that they would be corrected. But Supt. Teele said a review in December turned up numerous charter violations. In May the district board revoked the school’s charter.

“We all had very high hopes,” said Teele, acknowledging that the community needs a high school. “But they have not lived up to their obligation to comply with the charter.”

Unwilling to quit, charter school officials worked feverishly to fix the problems in hopes the board would rescind its revocation.

Last week, they said, the problems were well on their way to solution. Fingerprinting was completed, new laws would make cheap insurance available, and they had pledged to hire only credentialed teachers and administrators for the next school year. Volunteers collected 867 signatures in support of the school.

Hemet school district trustee Bill Sanborn, an Idyllwild resident and father of four, confessed to being torn between his “heart and head” in the decision. On one hand, he said, charter school officials “willfully and knowingly violated the charter and the law.” On the other, he said, “there’s good things happening in the classroom.”

Sanborn proposed an oversight official or body that would monitor the school’s progress. His plan failed in a 3-4 vote on Tuesday.

The district board urged charter school officials to return with a new proposal when all problems are cleared.

But school officials say they are tired from their uphill battle to save the school.

The experience, former teacher Ezzard said, “has truly smashed for me any ideals I have of reformation in public education. I’m running with my tail between my legs. The bureaucratic monster’s too big. The people at the top are extremely narrow-minded and unaware.”

Still, she said, “ It was the most difficult year I had in my life, and I wouldn’t give it up.”