A group of locals hoping to open a charter school in Columbus hit a snag Monday when they failed to successfully submit their entire application to the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board.
Darren Leach, the proposed chief executive officer of Inspire Charter School, said that during the application process Monday, he completed submitting 24 of the required 26 fields before being “locked out” of the online system.
“We didn’t get all of the components uploaded,” Leach said Tuesday morning. “It locked us out before we could hit submit.”
The deadline to have applications submitted was 3 p.m. Monday.
Leach said the application process was more complicated than he anticipated, but he remained hopeful. He hoped the authorizer board would consider the application despite it being incomplete. He said it was his understanding that if some of the elements of the application were incomplete, the authorizer baord would contact him and give him an additional 48 hours.
When contacted by The Dispatch on Tuesday, the state Charter School Authorizer Board only said an application from Inspire Charter School had been received.
Charter schools are publicly funded and do not charge tuition. They are run by private groups that agree to meet certain standards in exchange for less regulation. The Columbus school would serve children living within the city limits.
Monday’s application for a charter is the second one the group has submitted to the state board. The first was voted down this summer.
Erika Berry, executive director of the Mississippi Charter Schools Association, said in June the fact that the Columbus group had not named a principal in the first application worried members of the state authorizer board.
“They weren’t comfortable with giving that much power to a group without a clear leader in place,” Berry said of the board.
For their second attempt to gain a charter, the Columbus group named Reddell Holmes as the proposed principal, Leach said. Holmes is a native of the Golden Triangle who has served as a school superintendent in Michigan, according to Leach. He resigned from that position in late 2012, according to Michigan-based news agency M Live.
Leach also said the Columbus group decided to focus solely on an elementary school and would not be opening a high school, which was part of the initial plan.
Leach said the decision to cut the high school the second time around was based on the recommendation of the authorizer board. Combined with the fact that the curriculum and state regulations were vastly different between the elementary and the high school, Leach said it was too expensive to move forward with two separate schools.
Instead, the group chose to focus on the elementary.
“We couldn’t combine the two,” Leach said. “It would have been fiscally irresponsible at this point.”
If they are granted a charter, Leach said he hopes to be able to offer an after-school program for children of all ages, including high school.
The state board received seven charter applications. The board will vote on the charter school applications in December.
Sarah Fowler covered crime, education and community related events for The Dispatch.
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