Charter school facing uphill challenge to stay afloat

Less than one month.

That is the amount of time the Challenge Foundation Academy of Naples has to find a building and identify potential students before it is in danger of losing its support from the Collier County School District.

No support means no students would start at the charter school in August, which could mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding.

The directive from the district comes a little more than a month after the Challenge Foundation Academy, which is to be a charter school serving children primarily in the River Park area, found it did not have a home.

The Challenge Foundation Academy of Naples was set to open in August using leased space from the Fun Time Nursery. The Nursery, at 1010 Fifth Ave. N., is to open a new building on 12th Street North.

But construction on the building has not started, and the charter school needs to find a home and open by August or face the loss of $300,000 in federal seed money to start the school.

The failure to meet the August opening deadline would effectively doom the school’s charter, which is reviewed and can be revoked if guidelines on curriculum and management aren’t followed or the standards aren’t met, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Members of the school’s board appealed to the City of Naples last month for help finding a new home for the school.

They thought they had found it in the former Florida Power & Light building at the corner of 10th Avenue North and 10th Street North, said the school’s board president Larry Mullins, but negotiations are not proceeding as well as hoped.

“It is a high rent district, and we are not confident we will come to an agreement,” he said.

In addition, the school district wants numbers for the charter school, especially after the Collier County School Board approved the expansion of the program into a kindergarten through fifth grade school.

The students primarily will come from Lake Park Elementary, which will have 540 students and 28 teachers in the 2006-07 school year. The expansion of the charter school to 240 students means Lake Park will lose 13 teaching positions, or 46 percent of its teachers, according to Michele LaBute, the district’s chief operating officer.

“We can reassign those teachers to other buildings, but we need to know definitely ahead of time that the building will open,” she said.

Superintendent Ray Baker said the school district wants the charter school to be successful, but said the district cannot sacrifice to wait until summer for a decision on the school.

“We want to be successful as well,” he said.

The School Board told the Challenge Academy Foundation of Naples it needs to have a signed lease and children identified by March 1 to ensure the success for the school and the district.

Mullins said the school’s board would fight until the last hour to secure a lease and identify those children.

“Right now, it is not looking good, but we are going to keep trying,” he said. “We are very grateful for their consideration and I know the quandary they are in if we do not open on time. We have a lot of work to do.”

Joan Lange, the national schools director for the Challenge Foundation, told the Naples Daily News last month that the school would need at least 12 rooms to act as classrooms and administrative space.

School Board member Linda Abbott suggested that the school district could lease some of the classrooms in Lake Park Elementary School to the charter school.

“It has been done before in other communities,” she said. “This way, the students stay at their home school and not move somewhere different. It is an innovation worth considering.”

Some school officials weren’t as enthusiastic and Mullins was hesitant to say whether the Challenge Foundation Academy would ask the district to consider Abbott’s idea.

“We want to find our own facility,” he said. “I am sure that is something that will be discussed, but we will be talking with the district about a lot of things before the March 1 deadline. We’re not putting all of our eggs into one basket.”