New agreement will request increase to 1,144 students
The Board of Governors of Lake Oconee Academy has approved a draft application for the renewal of LOA’s charter with the Greene County and Georgia Boards of Education.
LOA’s current charter expires in June 2024.
At Monday night’s LOA board meeting, CEO Dr. Otho Tucker told the board that there might be a few very minor changes such as spelling or typos. The application has not been made public, but Tucker expected to send it to the Greene BOE and release it to the public by the end of this week.
Normally, a charter renewal for a highly successful school such as LOA would be fairly routine. However, just three months ago, the local BOE and LOA reached a settlement in a very contentious two-year-long lawsuit that was based on the confusion surrounding the previous charter renewal.
For that 2016 charter renewal, LOA submitted an application that listed enrollment limits that they projected for each year of the charter.
The Greene BOE maintained that the charter renewal was granted based on those enrollment limits, even though they were not specifically listed in the charter itself. As a result, in recent years the BOE has refused to pay LOA the per-pupil allocation for students over the enrollment limits in the 2016 charter application.
LOA filed suit against the BOE in September 2020, arguing that since those limits were not in the signed charter, the BOE should pay for all the students enrolled at LOA up to the limit of 1,051, which was included in the charter.
A solution for that was agreed to with LOA receiving additional money from the BOE but only for the remainder of the current contract. LOA withdrew its lawsuit but the enrollment issue could continue as part of the renewal process.
Tucker says the new application will request funding for up to 1,144 students.
Another big problem, not resolved in the lawsuit settlement, relates to the up to 3 percent administration fee that the school board is legally permitted to withhold from LOA’s funding. LOA demanded an itemization of the fee and the BOE maintained it would be too difficult and too costly to provide.
In the Georgia legislative session that just ended, both the House and the Senate overwhelmingly approved HB318, which would require school boards to itemize the administrative fee.
The session ended before the House had time to agree to changes made in the Senate, however, so that issue will likely still be part of the LOA’s charter renewal process.
But perhaps the biggest issue the two boards will have to work through is what, if any, change will be made to the structure of the Greene County school system.
Greene, like most school systems in Georgia, operates as a Strategic Waiver School System (SWSS) which, according to the Georgia DOE website, allows “flexibility in the form of waivers of certain state laws, rules and guidelines in exchange for greater accountability for increased student performance.”
It’s a hybrid of a traditional school system and an all-charter school system.
LOA gets its funding through the BOE, but the BOE has no control over how the money is spent.
The Greene BOE has been updating its strategic plan, and with LOA’s charter agreement ending, the school board is reviewing options. It could decide to become an all-charter school district, maintain the current system or revert to a traditional school system.
The change would be resisted by LOA.
“We should have a good idea once we complete our strategic planning session,” BOE Vice Chairman Steve Kilgore told the Lake Oconee News this week. He expects that to take another two months. Tucker has said the charter renewal application, approved by the Greene BOE, must be filed with the state by this fall.
BOE Chairman Perry Lee says he is optimistic that, despite the number of balls in the air and historical acrimony between the two boards, a solution that will improve education for all the county’s students can happen.
“Reasonable people should be able to work things out,” he said.
Also at Monday night’s LOA board meeting:
• Tucker said that the annual enrollment lottery for next school year would be held Wednesday, April 12. There are 451 applicants with 102 of them given higher priority for being children of school personnel or siblings of currently enrolled students. Chances for the 349 applicants without priority are very slim.
• The LOA board approved $ 182,000 for two buses that will be used to transport students for field trips, and athletic, cultural and other off-campus events.
• Tucker reported that 85-90 percent of the senior class have already been accepted at colleges or universities.