Charter schools advance in NH

Charter schools advance in N.H.

State approves 3 more facilities

By James Vaznis, Globe Staff | March 19, 2006

The New Hampshire Board of Education's approval last week of three charter school proposals, including one by Daniel Webster College in Nashua, shows how the alternative form of public schooling is growing in popularity in the Granite State after years of difficulty in getting started.

The state will have 11 charter schools once the doors to the three new schools open in the next two years. The first ones opened a year and a half ago, even though the state has allowed charter schools to exist for about a decade.

The growth of these schools is being fueled by a special program, passed by the Legislature a few years ago, that enables the state Board of Education to approve the opening of 20 charter schools without receiving the consent of local school boards or voters. Local opposition caused previous charter school proposals to fail.

Michael Fishbein, the provost and vice president of academic affairs for Daniel Webster College, said the college couldn't be more delighted about receiving state approval.

''The state is moving in the right direction," in opening charter schools, Fishbein said.

The school, which will be called the Academy for Science and Design, will be geared toward 450 students in grades 7-12 who are interested in pursuing careers in the math and sciences. Students in their junior and senior years will be able to major in a subject as they would in college. Among the choices: aeronautics and aviation, chemistry and biomedicine, and space, astronomy, and astronautics.

Daniel Webster hasn't secured a location for the school yet, but is considering an offer by New Hampshire Technical Community College to house the school on its Nashua campus, Fishbein said. The school will open in the fall of the next calendar year.

Education reformers hail charter schools as a great way to focus an entire school on a certain academic area or teaching philosophy. Teachers at the schools tend not to belong to a teachers union, making it easier for administrators to fire problematic teachers or to institute new programs or teaching strategies, charter school advocates say.

But critics don't like charter schools because states often divert aid away from a student's hometown school to the charter school the student attends.

That debate, however, was largely absent during the consideration of the three charter school proposals, even in Nashua, where a change in the state formula for education aid is causing the city to lose $2 million this year. In fact, Nashua Mayor Bernie Streeter, who is promising that next year's city budget will be 5 percent lower than this year's, wrote a letter to the state Board of Education in support of the charter proposal, according to the state Department of Education.

And in another sign of how New Hampshire is further embracing charter schools, the Nashua School District has applied for money to study the creation of a charter school for dropout students. Should that school open, it would be run independently of the school district, although the district could have a couple of its employees sit on the charter school's board. Two other school districts, one in Exeter and the other in the North Country, have opened charter schools for students at risk of dropping out.

New Hampshire has received a $7.5 million federal grant to jump start its charter school program.

The two other schools that received approval last week were an elementary school in the Concord area that will focus on early literacy and another for a rural village school in Surry, which is in the state's Mount Monadnock region. The latter school has filled its curriculum with many activities known to New England village life, such as maple sugaring, gardening, and bringing together people of multiple generations.

The village school will open this fall in a shuttered elementary school building in Surry. The closing of that school last summer has forced children to endure long bus rides to other towns for their elementary school education.

In an e-mail last week, Frank Conroy, the founder and chairman of the Board of the Alliance for Rural School and Village Preservation, said, ''This is a great day for schools of choice. . . . This approval highlights the vital role that rural, village schools have to play throughout New Hampshire."