Problems with Gateway Academy illustrate challenges of charter schools

3/5/02 – The parent firm of a California charter school has sued the Fresno school district, charging that it is being targeted because many of the school's administrators and teachers are Muslim, after the district revoked the school's charter in January.

Fresno schools, which granted the charter in 1998 to the Gateway Academy, a charter school located in the mountains east of Fresno, charged the school with a string of violations, including running up a debt of $1.3 million.

The confrontation has spurred debate in the state about the use of public money to support charter schools with a religious mission and other issues, including how far a charter school can be from its chartering agency. Gateway had opened campuses in Oakland and in other northern California cities.

There were reports in the media suggesting the school's leaders had ties to Muslim terrorists, but those claims have faded in recent weeks.

The state of California is investigating. In January, state law enforcement authorities raided Gateway Academy, taking away 60 computers and 100 boxes of documents.

School district officials charge that in addition to going way over budget, Gateway did not maintain proper records, allowed the teaching of religion in two of its 11 schools, did not complete fire inspections at its buildings, opened campuses without informing its authorizing agency, and did not obtain fingerprints for many of its employees, as required by law.

Gateway has filed suit against the Fresno school district, charging the matter was not handled appropriately. "If you look at the way other districts have handled revocation, they work with the charter school to bring them into compliance," the school's attorney, Frank Muna, told the Fresno Bee.

"The board's decision to revoke the Gateway charter was courageous and correct because they violated multiple areas of the charter school law," says district spokesperson Jill Marmolejo. "We believe the lawsuit is completely without merit."

The state department of justice investigation is focused on whether Gateway misused state funds. Gateway continues to operate its schools privately. Teachers are working without paychecks.

The California Network of Educational Charters (CANEC) supports the removal of the charter from Gateway, and has used the occasion of Gateway's problems to call for the following reforms to California's charter school law:

• an immediate moratorium on new charter schools from operating sites outside of the county in which they are granted, or an adjacent county, for a minimum of two years;

• a legal requirement that all public schools keep their sponsoring districts and agencies fully informed of all campus locations;

• a directive to the state's legislative analyst's office to report to the legislature on the effectiveness of the charter granting process; and

• allowing a district to charge a higher fee for oversight to a charter school located 150 or more miles from the district's closest office.

"As a taxpayer and as a charter school director, I am appalled that a public charter school apparently violated the law and secretly opened campuses," says Joe Lucente, president of CANEC and director of a Los Angeles-based charter school. "We need to embrace serious reform to prevent these isolated abuses from tarnishing the image of the many high-quality charter schools throughout California."

None of CANEC's proposals address the religion issue, however.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) wrote a letter to the state department of education, charging the Gateway school mixed religious instruction into its curriculum, and then pointed to accounts in local media that suggest the school's administrators are connected to a Pakistani cleric who is the founder of Muslims of America, a group federal authorities have tied to the terrorist al-Fuqra network. Muslims of America has been investigated in connection with a $300,000 workers compensation fraud scheme in Colorado in the early 1990s.

The school's leaders say they are not funding terrorists. They issued a statement blaming post-Sept. 11 "Islamophobia" as the reason they are being targeted.

Another California charter school that opened in November is under fire for similar issues. Guidance Charter School in Palmdale has been targeted by ADL and the American Civil Liberties Union for teaching the Koran. Of the school's 70 students, 30 are non-Muslim. The Palmdale school board, which voted 3-2 to approve its charter in October 2001, will vote this month on whether to extend it.