HADLEY — Leaders of a Chinese-language charter school want to build a new high school and more than double the size of the student body, but state Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester says not so fast.
Chester last year rejected the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School’s request to increase its maximum enrollment from 584 to 986 students, but school officials this week asked the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to reconsider.
School officials argue that the Chinese language school fills an important niche in public education and needs to make room for students progressing to high school.
The school currently enrolls 430 students from roughly 25 western Massachusetts communities, in grades kindergarten through 11. When the school opened in the fall of 2007, it was initially authorized to serve kindergarten through eighth grade. But its vision was always to be a K-12 school, said Richard Alcorn, executive director.
“At the end of the day, we are developing high-proficiency Chinese speakers,” he said. “No schools were prepared to take the kids graduating from our eighth-grade program,” he added, noting the addition of grades 9 to 11 and a plan to expand into 12th grade next year. “It doesn’t make sense to just let them drop off the cliff after eighth grade.”
Chester declined in January 2015 to bring the school’s expansion request to the state education board for consideration. He said the school had failed to provide “compelling evidence” that state officials should approve the expansion before the school’s charter is considered for renewal after the 2016-17 academic year.
In a letter sent to Alcorn, Chester noted that the Chinese school was awarded a charter amendment in February 2013 to add Grades 9 to 12 and increase enrollment by 284.
“The Board’s decision permitted implementation of the school’s proposed growth plan up to its first year of operation as a K-12 school and the end of its current charter term, in 2016-2017,” the letter statess.
Alcorn, however, wants to make plans now for a longer-term solution — one that would involve building a new high school at a different location than the school’s current site on Route 9.
“There is no way to further expand our existing facility,” Alcorn said, noting that the physical space of the building and parking lot is being used close to maximum.
If the school fails to secure permission to expand, Alcorn said it would create not only a space crunch but also financial hurdles for an institution whose ambitions are growing along with its enrollment. Without permission to increase enrollment, he said, school officials would hesitate to invest in the new high school structure.
“I expect few people run high schools with 140 kids,” he said, which is the number of high schoolers for which the school is currently authorized. “Over the long run, we need to be bigger to be a financially sustainable model.”
The school has a $6.24 million budget for the 2015-16 year, Alcorn said. Most of that comes from tax-supported state tuition payments, he said.
The school also receives small supplemental amounts from public school entitlement grants, a Taiwanese economic cultural organization, an NGO affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education and a grant for the National Security Language Initiative.
Alcorn said he needs a state-authorized head count to form a business plan.
“Without a head count, there is no future economic stream to support the addition of a building,” he said, adding that the current charter approval process leaves no time to plan, which is “not a good use of public funds.”
William Dwyer, clerk of the Hadley Planning Board, said if the expansion is approved by the state, it could take a minimum of three months for a new school building to get approved by the town.
“A nonprofit educational institution is substantially exempt from local zoning,” he said, explaining that Massachusetts General Law 40A, otherwise known as the Dover Amendment, provides that a school or church can be sited in a zoning district that might otherwise prohibit uses of that type.
“They could consider a much wider series of options in Hadley,” Dwyer said of school officials, “as opposed to being restricted to setting up a school in the business district on Route 9.”
Factors that would have to be reviewed, however, include site design, drainage plans, lighting, parking arrangements, and perhaps most significantly for a school, traffic impact.
“Schools tend to have very concentrated arrival and departure times,” said Dwyer. “Depending on where you are, we must consider what areas can handle a heavier traffic load.”
Dwyer added that the “overarching goal is to try to work with a developer so that the proposal is complementary to the neighborhood and not at odds with it.”
Alcorn hopes that with the addition of a well-attended high school program, the Pioneer Valley could become an area where companies want to relocate.
“China is a big trading partner with the United States,” he said, “and a pipeline of Chinese speakers is critically important to the nation, the state, and locally, if we are to compete in the global economy.”
He added that the ability to speak Mandarin is strongly preferred, and the school aims to position students to be ready for involvement in the global economy.
“It’s difficult for me to understand why the state would not want to support this,” he said.
The denial letter from Chester states that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education indicated in 2012 that the board of trustees could choose to pursue a subsequent enrollment increase at the time of its next renewal decision, but “based on the Department’s assessment of the school’s request using the criteria outlined in the Charter Amendment Guidelines, the school did not provide compelling evidence to revisit the decision prior to the school’s renewal decision in 2016-2017.”
The letter added that the denial decision “does not preclude the school from returning with this request at some point in the future.”
Alcorn has a phone conversation scheduled with the education department Friday, as part of the next step in the appeal process.
“My expectation is that the appeal will go through,” he said. “Our school is held in high esteem, internationally.”
On a related note, Alcorn said he asked Senate President Stanley Rosenberg of Amherst to bring a proposed change in admission policies to the Senate charter school working group. Under the proposals, charter schools could admit students based not only on a lottery but also on criteria such as language skills.
“State law should reflect the fact that there is no single school model that is best for all students, and it should support innovation and choice with a variety of quality alternatives,” he said.
His proposed changes, however, didn’t make it into the Senate draft of the new charter legislation.
Still, Alcorn is optimistic about the potential for an increase in maximum enrollment.
“I would hope…,” he said, adding with a laugh, “I guess we’ll get to hear.”
Sarah Crosby can be reached at scrosby@gazetteet.com.