Schools May Have to Help Charters Net Students

By Tiffany Erickson and Jennifer Toomer-Cook Deseret Morning News

Getting the word out is half the battle for some charter schools looking to net students from traditional schools. Healthy enrollments are critical in keeping the schools above water, and some lawmakers feel traditional schools should help charters out in recruiting students.

Currently schools don’t have to give out student addresses or phone numbers to outsiders who come asking. Some districts craft policies against it to protect families from an onslaught of junk mail.

But some say charter schools should be the exception.

Last year DaVinci Academy, an Ogden charter school, was denied its request to Ogden and Weber school districts for high school student addresses for a recruitment mailer it wanted to send to parents. So the school ended up spending more than $10,000 on an advertising campaign that leaders said was inefficient.

Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, says he plans to address the matter with a bill opening the flow of information between traditional public and public charter schools, which are funded with the same Utah tax dollars.

“It’s concerning to hear (district) hostility toward another public school,” Stephenson told the legislative Administrative Rules Review Committee, of which he is co-chairman. “I wonder, how many students would have excelled (at DaVinci) but were not given that opportunity?”

The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allows public schools to share student directory information, such as telephone numbers, addresses and yearbook photos, said Jean Hill, attorney and State Office of Education government and legislative relations specialist.

Districts can set policies on whether they want to do that but they can’t discriminate based on content. And the concern is, if they open the door to one, they must open the door to all.

DaVinci spokesman Dan Early said he believes Ogden and Weber school districts had given student information to at least one private college and the Northern Utah Academy for the Arts and Science — the high-tech charter high school that sprang from a district and state partnership.

Early said DaVinci’s advertising netted few students, while NUAMES’ seats were full and the school had to resort to lottery.

But Weber Superintendent Michael Jacobsen said they denied DaVinci’s request, not only because the district had a new policy against it, but because it is not the schools’ job to get the word out about charter schools. And if information was given out, it was before their policy was established.

“(Charter advocates) push alternative schools of choice and then want traditional schools to do everything they can to help them,” Jacobsen said. “If they aren’t good enough on their own it is not the (traditional) public schools’ obligation to get their enrollment up.”

But Stevenson said students and parents have a right to be informed of their educational choices.

“We’re a public school — if we are trusted with public money it only makes sense that we are able to contact parents and let them know what we are doing with that money,” Early said.

Currently there is no policy about information sharing between state agencies. The bill would give the state school board direction in establishing a rule to govern how public schools would be able to access mailing lists to ensure that students and their parents are informed of those public school opportunities.

“If the district schools had the interest of students foremost in their minds, they would in my opinion automatically want students to be informed about what choices are available,” Stephenson said.

E-mail: terickson@desnews.com, jtcook@ desnews.com