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NEW BEDFORD — City and Alma del Mar charter school officials have signed the memorandum of understanding, but it will have to go before the New Bedford School Committee and Alma Board Board of Trustees.
“This has not been an easy process, and both sides were very tough negotiators,” said Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley in an emailed statement. “Despite their differences, I have continued to be impressed with how the leaders of the city, the district, and the charter school are continuing to pull together and find solutions for the students of New Bedford.”
New Bedford Public Schools and Alma del Mar leaders have been working for weeks to negotiate an MOU for a neighborhood charter school, the first time a Commonwealth charter school and a city have agreed to integrate a charter into the district’s student assignment system.
After the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved on Jan. 22 the neighborhood charter model, along with a separate expansion plan for Alma, the schools had 45 days to finalize the MOU, with an initial Feb. 25 deadline. Riley then gave them a two-week extension and the new deadline was March 12.
Mayor Jon Mitchell, Superintendent Thomas Anderson, and Will Gardner, founder and executive director of Alma del Mar, have signed the MOU.
The New Bedford School Committee and Alma del Mar Board of Trustees must vote to approve the MOU in order for it to become effective. Those votes are expected to take place by early next week, according to Jacqueline Reis, spokeswoman for Commissioner Riley.
The Alma del Mar Board of Trustees is set to meet Monday, 5 p.m., at the charter school to discuss the MOU. It’s not clear when the School Committee plans to meet.
If both boards ratify the MOU, Riley would look for the conveyance of the former Kempton School and approval of enabling legislation for New Bedford by early May to give the school and New Bedford families sufficient time to plan for a fall opening, she said.
A vote regarding Kempton would have to go before the School Committee and the City Council in order for Alma del Mar to get it at no cost.
The charter school will be responsible for improvements to the former school built in 1901. School officials have said they plan to open in a temporary space and the second campus will need an addition to increase the capacity of the building to serve 450 students.
The temporary space will be at the former Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception school building at 136 Earle St., in the Near North End.
Alma will lease the space, down the street from its flagship school, which includes 12 classrooms, a gymnasium and stage.
According to the MOU obtained by The Standard-Times, no additional charter seats for Alma del Mar will be requested until the end of the third year of operation of the new campus.
There are a lot of details to the MOU, Gardner said, many of which are a result of taking two different systems and trying to create something new.
According to a statement from Gardner, over 100 families currently on Alma’s waitlist live near the former Kempton School on Shawmut Avenue.
“We met many of them at our admissions lottery last month and every one of them was thrilled about the possibility of having Alma be their neighborhood school,” he said.
“This agreement sets the stage for Alma to create another great public school for kids in New Bedford in collaboration with the district. We’re looking forward to meeting Alma’s newest 200 scholars and their families who will join our school community in August, after the final approvals are in place.”
In a press release, Anderson emphasized that the decision to increase the number of charter seats in the city rests with the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education based on current law. “The proposed adjusted boundaries were carefully considered in order to mitigate the impact on the district’s neighborhood schools.”
“Since the beginning of our discussions about establishing a neighborhood charter school instead of a traditional charter that would draw from a citywide lottery, it has been clear that this arrangement contemplates a fairer way to do charter schools for the first time in Massachusetts — fairer to the City, fairer to taxpayers, and fairer to students in district schools,” Mitchell said in a news release.
“While the threat of expansion is an unfortunate reality under the Commonwealth’s charter school law, which heavily favors expansion, the impacts on the city’s finances will about half of the alternative of 594 charter school seats,” the mayor said. “As I’ve said before, the legislature needs to fix the charter school law so that cities with seats available under the charter school ‘cap’ are not faced with such financially untenable choices.”
Ricardo Rosa, co-chair of the New Bedford Coalition to Save Our Schools, said they’re continuing to voice their resistance against the deal with Alma del Mar with regard to the expansion and potentially giving away the Kempton School.
“The public is in the dark about the entire structure of the MOU. That’s a problem,” Rosa said.
“This deal is, again, unprecedented,” he said.
He said they’re “adamantly opposed” to officials noting it’s not a done deal, yet families started receiving letters that they’re assigned to the new Alma del Mar campus prior to the MOU being signed.
“I see it as problematic,” he said. “I see it as democracy being derailed.”
