The Chino Valley Unified School Board has again denied a charter petition by proponents of the Neighborhood Arts and Science Academy.
Advocates for the school were turned down in January and  sought  to reinterest the district in the charter school.
Chino Valley Unified has had a positive experience with another charter school, the Oxford Preparatory Academy, which has been in existence for two-and a-half years, and is the highest-performing school in San Bernardino County in terms of students’ scores on state standardized tests.
The school board recharted Oxford Preparatory Academy in December.
The sponsors of the Neighborhood Arts and Science Academy are proposing that the school serve kindergarten through eighth-graders beginning in the fall. They envision it as focusing on arts, science and technology, and preparing students to live and work in a global society. They are befuddled by the district’s reluctance to back the project after the success achieved with Oxford.
The California Education Code provides for the formation of charter schools under the aegis of that sponsoring local school district, although the charter school has its own separate school board or board directors.  Charter schools function outside the normal parameters of normal schools and can offer a curriculum and educational smorgasbord unavailable in traditional public schools.
The sponsoring district sustains a loss of funding from the state per student attendance at the charter school. While Oxford Preparatory Academy is a feather in the cap of Chino Valley Unified, paying for its operation reduces the amount of money available to the district’s traditional schools.
Chino Valley Unified examined the earlier and the latest petitions for the Neighborhood Arts and Science Academy’s chartering and concluded that the proposed school’s education program was unsound, did not contain a comprehensive description of 10 of 16 educational elements required by the district, did not meet the charter conditions contained in the state’s Education Code and that the petitioners were not likely to implement the program as described.
The Neighborhood Arts and Science Academy’s proponents have resolved to appeal the matter to the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools. After consultations with that office, the petitioners are making technical changes to their petition and will resubmit it to the San Bernardino County Board of Education.