By Joe White - WPLN News -

Tennessee has received its first application for a charter school that’s not in the big cities. Previously charter schools have only been in the urban areas of Nashville, Memphis and Chattanooga. The application marks a shift in more than one way.

Matt Throckmorton is the executive director of the Tennessee Charter School Association. He says a new law passed by the state legislature this year changes the state’s original intent to serve only inner city kids.

“But now that we have open enrollment it’s really a policy acknowledgement that they want to have suburban…well, charter schools outside the inner city.”

A group in Blount County in East Tennessee has applied to set up a charter school with a STEM focus, stressing science, technology, engineering and math.

“With Blount County, it’s clearly a suburban school, but a lot of the students that they draw from would probably be classified as rural students. So it’ll be pretty neat. It’s an elementary school that will grow eventually into a K through eight.”

Throckmorton says proposed charter schools that serve at-risk students may get extra points during the application process. But he says the new law makes it possible to design more narrowly focused schools, open to all students, not just those deemed “at-risk.”

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The new law changing the enrollment possibilities for charter schools is Public Chapter 466, the governor’s charter school revamp that passed in the last weekend of the legislative session.

In the final law (above), Section 2 (a) (1) [on the first page] is the “open enrollment” clause. Democrats for many years made it a hot button issue, saying charter schools should serve students defined as “at risk” or who attend failing schools.

The new charter school law got 9 “no” votes in the Senate, 18 in the House, all Democrats.

Section 4(b)(1)(C) [still on the first page of the new law] says a charter school application gets extra points if it serves students assigned to currently failing schools, students who didn’t score as “proficient” in the previous year, and those eligible for reduced lunches.

Throckmorton says this amounts only to a “boost” during the application process.

“With the recent change, we now have open enrollment, and so applications can receive a preference … kind of a little boost in the application process, if they’re focusing on the categories of students that you mentioned [students in failing schools and “at-risk”). Which, those categories came from the original drafting of the law, which really focused charter schools just on the inner city. So, the inner city, we want you to look and serve these types of students.”

Because charter schools can be shut down after two years of low marks in the same subject, Throckmorton argues they are more accountable than traditional public schools.

“They’re charter schools, they’re public schools, they take the TCAP and Gateway, they have certified teachers, they perform special education. All of that is the traditional school. They simply have the authority to do things differently and then there’s a greater degree of accountability. So if they go a number of years of failing to produce the academics, they can be closed down.”

Thorntorn also says if debt service and special education are taken into account, charters typically get about 75 percent of the funds that a local system would spend per student.

“So for a small school district that might be spending… $8,000 per pupil, or $7,000, then the charter school would end up with $5600, or… somewhere in there, per pupil.”

“We recognize that the money follows the student, so we just have to be highly accountable for how that money is spent, both in terms of the money, but also the results, which is academic [outcomes].”

Throckmorton is drafting a model plan for rural charter schools expected to be rolled out in November. Among other things, charters in rural and suburban districts are expected to be designed as smaller schools, an informal acknowledgement that the charter school advocates don’t want to upset local school boards by raiding their budget.

“But what we’re going to have to deal with, is a much small student population base to draw from. We want to have a real small footprint so that when the school goes in it’s not a big impact on the school district itself.”

So the Charter School Association is focusing on smallschools, or as Throckmorton calls it, a “really small operational model, that might work on a hundred, or a hundred and twenty students, total, serving multiple grades.”

He says two small charter high schools in Shelby County furnish a model for this sort of design.

“They start out with one class, and that class has 35 students, so two teachers and a class of 35. And they’ve made the whole thing work just on the budget generated by 35 students. So they’ll grow 35 a year, and they’re both high schools. So they’re delivering high school academics, in this small setting.”

The first charter schools for suburbs and rural settings may look a lot like the old “little red schoolhouse” of American legend, he says.

“We also will probably have, I believe it’s called an interdisciplinary classroom, where you’ll have one class that will have several different grade level student in there. So kind of a one-room schoolhouse setting. So it’s something that I think will appeal to rural Tennessee. A lot of the folks grew up, and they’re familiar with that kind of a setting. But with technology and highly-qualified teachers and such, I think we can really excel in that kind of an environment.”

Computer and communication technology will allow teachers from remote locations to bring their lessons to the class, he says, allowing charter schools to be more tightly focused academically.

“So over time, we will have charter schools that have a very hyper-focused college curriculum with a very aggressive delivery, like a magnet school. The difference is, anybody will be able to go to that charter school.”