Deerfield Elementary School sixth-grader Oscar Cloutier-Potter wants to get his hands on some technology in school, and he wants to do it as soon as possible.
So, next year, his mother Ann-Mary Cloutier will send him off to the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School in South Hadley, where he’ll be able to get some flight time in the school’s filmmaking program and indulge his love of music with the school’s heavy focus on the performing arts.
PVPA is a charter school — one of the sort that have been at the center of a contentious debate at the state level over whether more should be allowed to open or expand in Massachusetts. The cap is currently set at 120.
Charter schools were developed in the 1990s to act as public schools with more flexibility to experiment and innovate. The hope was that the charters would share the techniques or ideas that worked well with the district schools.
Locally, administrators from both sides — district and charter — said that hasn’t quite happened, with public district schools saying the charter schools haven’t reached out, while Four Rivers Principal Peter Garbus said his school has been met with apparent disinterest when it tried.
On one side of the expansion debate, business-backed proponents and some of the state’s top officials, including Gov. Charlie Baker, fighting to lift the cap with a ballot referendum, say increasing access to charter schools would give families more choice in how their children are educated, while on the other, union-backed opponents and traditional school officials say raising the limit could deal a major blow to district schools’ revenue and programs — maybe even threatening their existence.
But wait lists for charter school seats are well-populated in Massachusetts, with more than 30,000 people waiting for their name to come up.
What’s the draw?
For the Cloutiers, it was about choice and their son’s specific interests and aptitudes.
“We applied to a lot of private schools, charter schools, and visited them all,” Cloutier said. “It turns out the charter we got into was the one he identified with most.”
But just because PVPA’s specificity was the right fit for Oscar doesn’t mean it will work for every student, she said. “He doesn’t like to follow the garden path; he just kind of likes to machete his own way.”
She thinks Frontier Regional High School, where Oscar would have gone had he not been accepted at a charter, is still a perfectly good school. “Frontier also has a good music program, so it was really neck-and-neck.” She noted her younger son Henry may end up going there when he leaves Deerfield Elementary. “I do support my local school system — I think it’s a totally viable choice.”
Tamara Grogan, a member of Four Rivers’ board of trustees, said she sent her own daughter to the school to give her a smaller class environment. Grogan said her daughter wanted to either ski or play Frisbee in high school, so they considered Mohawk and Four Rivers. Up until a week before school, she was set to start at Mohawk before she was accepted to the charter school at the 11th hour.
“Parents are looking for ways to meet their kids’ needs, and it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing. It’s options,” Grogan said of the charter debate. “Her involvement in everything at school … she pushed herself to be an athlete, she was captain of her team for three years. … She wouldn’t have been that person, I don’t think, if she had been in a bigger place.”
Cloutier said she’d like to see the financial side of the issue — one of the most controversial parts of the discussion — resolved to make the funding more equitable between charter schools and traditional districts.
“There’s this vibe that it’s us against them, union versus charter school, and it’s sad. I don’t want to make it worse someplace else because I made a different choice,” Cloutier said. “I think if we hadn’t gotten in any place, we would have been fine.”