MISSOULA — A special Sunday board meeting was called for Missoula County Public Schools regarding its 2024 charter school contracts.
The special meeting of the MCPS Board of Trustees will be held at 9 a.m. on Feb. 25, 2024, where the final contract of the two proposed charter schools will be discussed ahead of the Feb. 27 deadline.
The meeting will be held over Zoom. The link can be found here.
MCPS sent the state an application for two charter schools last October after House Bill 459 passed through the legislature.
The bill authorized "The establishment of public charter schools and districts as a means of providing additional educational opportunities."
The public charter schools will be governed by local school districts.
MCPS’s application was approved by the Montana Board of Public Education on Jan. 19, along with 19 other applications from across the state.
The Board of Public Education then had 45 days to write and solidify contracts for each of the proposed charter schools.
School Works, an education consulting firm, helped the Board execute each contract.
McCall Flynn, executive director of The Montana Board of Public Education, says the collaboration was helpful, as this is the first year of charter contracts for the state.
“It's flying the plane while you build it,” she says.
The state's deadline to finalize the contracts is March 4, a deadline that is signed into the House Bill.
According to Flynn, The Board of Public Education worked as fast as possible to get the contracts to each district.
Flynn sent each district an email on Feb. 15 telling them the contracts would be sent out soon.
The schools received the contracts on Tuesday, Feb. 20, and were then able to ask for revisions.
The Board of Public Education took the revision requests into account — many concerning language and deadlines for certain reporting requirements.
The revised contract was sent back to districts on Feb. 22, with a deadline to have them signed and sent back to the state by Monday, Feb. 26.
The Montana Board of Public Education meeting regarding the charter contracts will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 28 at 8:30 a.m.
The state needs each contract signed by Monday in order to release them to the public prior to their meeting.
Flynn said in her email to school districts that only the chair of the Board of Trustees was required to sign the contract, not the entire board.
However, each district had the option to call a full meeting.
The short window forced MCPS to schedule a Sunday morning board meeting in order to discuss the contract and sign it as a group.
“I understand that we are operating in a tight time frame here, it’s not ideal, but we’ll do our best given the time that we have,” MCPS spokesperson Tyler Christensen says.
In lieu of the recent controversies concerning budget cuts, the MCPS Board of Trustees wanted to ensure the public knew why the meeting was happening on a weekend and on such short notice.
“It felt important to me to make sure that people knew that this was a separate and administrative piece of business that just needed to happen on a short time frame because of a request from the state, not to push forward any conversations that were happening inside of the district,” MCPS board member Grace Decker says.
Decker and Christensen both believe the Sunday meeting will be short, as the contract was already revised once, and the board of Trustees voted unanimously to approve both charter schools in October.
“I think we have really solid charter school proposals, and I am pretty assured that our contracts reflect that,” Christensen says.
MCPS applied for two public charter schools.
The first is the TEACH (Teaching Excellence in the Arts and Creative Harmony) Academy, which will be an arts-focused K-5 school. The first year will enroll 75 students between kindergarten and second grade.
TEACH Academy will also provide teacher training opportunities through high school internships.
The second charter school will be Connect Academy — a 6-12 online school prioritizing self-learning.
The additional schools could help with staff retention, according to Decker.
“These new charter schools will actually create employment positions within the district that otherwise might be going away, and so in this time of budget shortfalls, we are excited about the opportunity to potentially retain more of our staff by utilizing these charter schools,” she says.
The goal of charter schools within MCPS and the state of Montana is to provide an alternative option for families and meet varying student needs.
Public charter schools must follow the same state regulations and laws as public schools, and they will be governed by the local school district.
The main difference between the two public schools is that charter schools are able to add additional intentions into the curriculum — for example, a special focus on art or movement, or towards college readiness.
Families with interest in the new charter schools can request an interest survey from MCPS.
After filling out the survey, families will be updated on any developments regarding the charter schools.
