Hart District finalizes school charter changes

In a continuing series of changes to the Opportunities for Learning school charter, members of the governing board finalized a material revision to the OFL charter on Wednesday.

To comply with a new state law pertaining to charter schools, OFL, located in the William S. Hart Union High School District, has been working to revise parts of its five-year charter school petition it currently has with the district.

When OFL applied for its charter, which was approved by the Hart district in April 2017, they planned to include resource centers around the valley, but a change in state law forced the school to revisit its charter, a spokesman for the Hart district said. “Hence the material revision change.”

The new state law relates to an Oct. 2016 decision by the Third District Court of Appeals, which ruled that charter schools are no longer allowed to operate a resource center outside of their chartering district’s boundaries and within the same county as the district.

When the ruling was announced, OFL operated four resource centers in the Antelope Valley area. In order to meet the requirements of the new state law, OFL changed its charter to state that it does not intend to operate resource centers outside of the Hart district’s boundaries.

Last year, OFL applied for a waiver with the state Board of Education to allow OFL to continue its resource center locations until June 30, 2018, as it worked to comply with the new location requirement.

“Given that the law change was going to have such an impact, the state allowed a year grace period to enable the charter schools and the districts that grant those charters to work out a compromise,” Dave Caldwell said. “OFL is now coming to the board saying they have removed certain resource centers from the charter.”

“What OFL will do with those disbanded resource centers is up to them,” Caldwell added.

At a regular Governing Board meeting on March 28, a public hearing was held to discuss Opportunities for Learning’s request for a material revision to their charter petition for the term July 1, 2017-July 30, 2022,” this week’s agenda states. “No objections to the material revision have been made, and an analysis by staff did not reveal any problems.”