Still a Game of Musical Chairs for Bilingual Charter School

After having its opening this past fall delayed by legal technicalities, the status of Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS) remains uncertain, with its founders still at loggerheads with the surrounding public school districts.

Nearly six months after their original plans were torpedoed by the Plainsboro zoning board, the founders of the new bilingual Mandarin-English immersion charter school are still searching for a location.  The school had been scheduled to open this past September at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Plainsboro.

“It’s still musical chairs going on between various schools,” said PIACS co-founder Parker Block, in a recent interview with AllPrinceton.  “We received from the Department of Education (DOE) an extension year, so the application doesn’t have to be reapproved.”

Block added that it was too early to name potential spots, but they hoped to finalize the site by March or April, in time for the school’s first intake in the Fall of 2011.

The delayed opening meant that the original Head of School and some teachers who had already been hired had to take different jobs last year.  Block said they have been actively looking for new staff. “We have received already more than thirty applications for Head of School,” said Block, describing the candidates as all “well-qualified.”

The founders had thought that the main challenge in setting up the school would be organizational, including student enrollment and staff hiring.  But Block said the biggest obstacle turned out to be strong opposition from the affected public school districts - Princeton Regional, West-Windsor Plainsboro and South Brunswick.

“The administrators of the school districts are determined to do and spend anything to stop the charter school from opening,” he said.

Block claimed that at the Plainsboro zoning meeting last July,  the school districts’ attorney had “openly threatened” the zoning board with a lawsuit if the zoning board heard the school’s application.  PIACS was then unable to get a certificate of occupancy before the Department of Education’s deadline.

While acknowledging that the school’s notice had omitted the business hours during which its documents could be reviewed, Block argued that the hours were “well-known” by the community, saying that “every single public notice had exactly the same deficiency.”

“Two of the planning board members said it was frivolous.  There were hundreds of people at the meeting, and many observed that it was an example of the very crass politics which has gripped public education,” Block said.  “Since then, we’ve been informed by people in the state government that the school districts’ attorneys continue their attempts to find some kind of dirt upon which to challenge [us].”

Others felt that the legal infractions were not to be sniffed at.

“The law is very clear,” said Rebecca Cox, president of the Princeton Regional Schools (PRS) Board of Education.  “Compliance is an extremely fundamental part of the law.”

Block also slammed the school district administrators for “giving false testimony” to the state Senate in a hearing last September.

“They said that the school is basically going to segregate the community because it is created for Chinese and founded by Chinese, but the majority of students who applied last year had no Chinese heritage whatsoever,” said Block.

 But Cox explained that over half of the students in the Mandarin language program at Princeton High School were of Asian heritage, although this group constitutes only 13.8% of the student population in the district.

“We feel that we know from our Mandarin program at the High School that any school that is Mandarin will attract a large amount of ethnic Chinese,” she said.

Block also claimed that the Princeton and West-Windsor Plainsboro school districts had spent a lot of taxpayers’ money, including hiring “very expensive” lawyers and “preparing for some kind of baseless legal action against us or DOE next year.”

However, Lewis Goldstein, the PRS Assistant Superintendent for Human Resources, Public Information and Community Relations, said that fees for hiring an attorney were split evenly across the three school districts and already included in their budgets.

“We are still monitoring the situation,” Cox said.  She added that any action would be legislative, rather than lawsuits.

“Any legal fees are a pittance compared to the millions of dollars that we will spend down the road,” Cox remarked.  She said that the district’s experience in funding the Princeton Charter School for many years was indicative of the strong impact on the district budget.

Funding has been a main bone of contention.  Public school districts argue that charter schools such as PIACS drain much-needed funding away from public schools, especially with the state’s recent budget cuts.

 “We can’t afford to spend millions on a handful of students,” said Cox.  “Public schools have the same outcome for less cost when similar cohorts are compared.”

 “Does the money belong to the administrator or the child?” Block countered.  He cited the principle of ‘the money follows the child’ enshrined in the Interdistrict School Choice Act passed last September.  The act states that the allocated tax dollars will follow the child from one school district to another if a family wants to send a child to a different public school.

“Unlike traditional public schools, if a charter school gets no enrollment, it gets no money.  The only way the charter school gets funding is because parents believe in it,” Block said.  “The state says, let parents decide.  The school district says, we are administrators, we have the mandate to spend money as we see fit, it’s our money not the child’s.”

But school administrators say that students who choose charter schools still leave the regular public schools with allocated fixed costs such as transportation, energy and facilities costs.

“The district winds up supporting the charter school twice: once for 90% of the phantom variable funding per pupil and once for 100% of the fixed costs that remain with the district,” explained Goldstein.

He cited the district’s experience with its existing charter school, Princeton Charter School, as an example of the financial impracticalities of opening another charter such as PIACS.

“The only way PRS can sustain the current financial arrangement is to continue to cut staff and programs for the vast majority of public school students in order to fund the 10% of Princeton students at the Princeton Charter School. This is not in the best interest of our students or our taxpayers and was not the intent of the original charter legislation,” said Goldstein.

The school districts also see PIACS as an unnecessary duplication of limited resources.

“West-Windsor Plainsboro [school district] has Mandarin instruction from 4th grade, and there is a very good Mandarin program at Princeton High School,” said Cox.  Goldstein added that students had been performing well “score-wise” and were well-prepared for college courses.

A letter sent by PRS to the Commissioner of Education in November 2009 had also described Princeton Regional as “the only New Jersey Model K-12 District for world languages,” with its program being “one of immersion.”

However, Block called the regular schools’ view of immersion “laughable.”  Explaining that  “Chinese takes six times more instructional time to achieve the same level of proficiency as with a Romance language,” Block said that the focus at PIACS is on Mandarin as a language of instruction.  English is introduced as a second language from first grade and its usage gradually increased until instruction is equally divided between the two languages in 4th grade.

“The actual definition of language immersion is at least 50% of the school day,” said Block.  “The school districts are trying to convince [the public] that what is taught now is immersion, even if it is only a language class one hour per day, simply because the teacher doesn’t speak a word of English during that hour.”

“I don’t think the two can be compared,” Cox said.  “It’s like apples and oranges, the [PIACS] kindergarten immersion program versus the High School’s AP language program.”

Block also stressed the growing strategic importance of Mandarin among other languages such as Farsi and Arabic, and the push by political leaders including President Obama and New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt to improve foreign language education, seen as critical for economic and national security.

Still, Cox said the problem with PIACS is that it is a “boutique charter school” with a “specialized focus.”  Goldstein also criticized this “focus on electives,” adding, “they don’t have the resources to provide a well-rounded curriculum.”

Judith Wilson, the PRS Superintendent, described it as an issue of wants versus needs.  “Programs should not be dismantled to serve the wants of a small group of people,” she said.  “Don’t break the backbone of success of public schools.”

Block said, however, that any innovation is often thought of as a niche, but is eventually adopted by the wider populace.

“Like in the 1980s and 1990s, in the U.S. computers were very much a niche, seen as only for students doing programming.  But now it’s something that everyone does,” he explained, drawing an analogy with the proliferation of schools with computers and offering computer classes.

This is why the founders want PIACS to be a public rather than private school, although its charter school status has been a huge stumbling block.

Block said that language immersion schools have been around for many years, but are seen as for the elite and international-minded. “[They] were once the purview of private schools, but we need more in the public sector.”

He cited top suburban districts such as in California, Colorado, Minnesota and Massachusetts that are taking the lead in introducing public language immersion schools.  A similar Spanish immersion charter school, Hoboken Dual Language School (HoLa), in Hoboken, NJ, also opened in September this year.

“We have to dramatically change the way we teach foreign languages to our children.  This type of education is going to come to public schools eventually,” Block said.

He added that demand for PIACS was growing, despite the current difficulties.

“The number of applications is more than what we had last year,” he said.  “Many parents are hearing good things and reading about language immersion schools across the country, inquiry-based programs like the International Baccalaureate (IB), and also the importance of China.”

Block lamented that the students who had registered for second grade this year would be one year too old to enter the school in 2011. “There are 50 students who wanted to attend but will not be able to attend next year,” he said.

For its first intake, PIACS will only be accepting students in three levels, from Kindergarten to Grade 2.

The school offers the International Baccalaureate curriculum, and Block said that it intends to be officially recognized as an IB World School within two to four years of opening.  Currently no public or private schools in the three districts offer the IB program.

The PIACS controversy is but one instance of the growing debate on the role of charter schools in the state's school system.  The issue has been intensified by the New Jersey DOE’s goal to triple the number of charter schools in the state, while slashing public education budgets.

Drawing from the past year’s experience, Block said that the founders were going to try to highlight how PIACS was linked to the larger issues surrounding educational reform.  “It has become clear that the issues raised are not specific to our school or community.  The situation is the same around the country,” he said.

About the Author

Audrye Wong

Princeton University, Class of '13