School Board Schedules Second Hearing on Proposed Charter School

The founders of the proposed Keystone Charter School, as promised in March, have resubmitted their application to the local school board, which gave it a resounding thumbs down in February.

A board hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 3. School district officials say they won't make the new application available until after that night and the leader of the charter school effort also won't talk about the revisions now.

“The BKACS application is voluminous and being reviewed internally at this time by the board and a few administrators. We are drafting questions for the hearing,” said Superintendent Bill Gretzula.

Ark Libkind, the leading founder of the proposed school, said Tuesday that he would need to talk to his lawyer before he might be able to say anything.

“I'm not sure if it advisable to publish the revisions right now,” said Libkind, who in March said, “There are not a lot of things we need to fix.”

It is unlikely district leaders would agree.

When the board rejected the application Feb. 23, it provided a laundry list of reasons including a lack of educational experience among school founders; budget deficiencies; and failure to demonstrate sustainable community support. Board members also said several “factual discrepancies” in the application had left them with a lack of trust.

Libkind has said the state charter school law does not require founders to have educational background nor for an application to include a detailed budget. But he also has said the board ignored the fact that two founders have significant educational experience.

He previously said the new submission will include the resumes of founders.

Libkind also has said the founders would appeal to the state if the board does not approve the revised application.

In the initial application, the school was proposed for the Metropolitan Industrial Center in Trevose, despite the fact that would require zoning variances from the township.

The school has been planned to utilize the International Baccalaureate Organization program.

A ten-page resolution approved by the board was comprised of 23 findings to support the rejection. They included the board's belief that none of the school founders had any experience with the IBO program nor any experience with K-12 administration or teaching. The board also said there was no evidence the founders had contacted the IBO organization.

The board also criticized the founders for misrepresenting support from the community including never providing promised letters of support from local elected officials.

Budget deficiencies cited by the board included “grossly inadequate” funding for employee medical insurance and outdated figures for pension funding.

Libkind, director of a former law enforcement academy in Philadelphia, previously said the new application would not include more funding. He said the initial application may have contained mistakes but he disputed the board's contention that it included “erroneous and unreliable misinformation.”

The founders previously said more than 300 members of the community support the project and that 300 students had pre-enrolled.

The Keystone Academy would be the second charter school in Bensalem, with School Lane Charter School already in operation.

A decision on the revised Keystone application is not expected during the Aug. 3 hearing.

The hearng is scheduled for immediately after the board's regular 7:30 pm meeting that night at the Dorothy Call Administrative Center on Donallen Drive.