Our View: A laurel and a dart for Windy Boy's charter school bill

Kudos to Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, for trying to do something to improve education on Indian reservations and throughout Montana.

Windy Boy cites the high dropout rate and discipline problems at reservation schools as one of his reasons for introducing his bill on charter schools in Montana.

Windy Boy said Montana needs to put charter school regulations in statute, rather than including the regulations in administration rules of Montana, and said doing so might help Montana pick up money that could be coming down the pike from the federal government, with President Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, a major proponent of charter schools.

His proposal would establish a seven-member commission to rule on proposed charters for schools and to regulate charter schools, and would require a school district to hold a public hearing about creating a charter school if at least 20 percent of the voters in a district request one. If approved, the charter schools under his bill would be funded under the same formula public schools are funded.

The bill passed the House 55-44 Feb. 27, and is scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Education and Cultural Resources Committee March 27.

Windy Boy’s intentions deserve great praise. His methods do not.

His bill is taking time from a legislative session trying to deal with budget reductions and program cuts to talk about something the state already does.

Not only does Montana allow the creation of charter schools, districts in two communities, Libby and Bozeman, did just that last year.

In echoes of bills proposed in recent legislative sessions — all of which failed to become law — the main change in Windy Boy’s proposal is that the charter schools would not be regulated under Montana’s public school requirements.

“A public charter school is not subject to the general supervision of the board of public education or the accreditation standards but is authorized through a charter granted by the public charter school commission,” his House Bill 376 reads.

Although Windy Boy’s bill says the school must meet or exceed the educational outcomes of Montana’s non charter public schools, they would not be overseen by the same board as the other schools. In other words, what “meeting or exceeding” means would be decided by a different, appointed body.

That means if a school board wants to do something that violates Montana accreditation and regulation policies, if the commission agrees, the charter school can do it. But the Montana taxpayers will be paying for it either way.

If any school, on or off a reservation, wants to propose a charter school, it can do so now.

Windy Boy’s bill is something that is not needed and could create serious problems with the educations taxpayers are paying for.