Voyager school gets 5-year renewal

The state Public Charter School Commission has approved its first charter renewal application as part of its review of 33 schools with contracts that expire in June.

The commission’s duties under the state’s charter school law include “determining whether each charter contract merits renewal, nonrenewal or revocation.”

Commissioners voted Thursday to award Voyager: A Public Charter School a five-year renewal. The Moiliili school, with 300 students enrolled in grades kindergarten through eight, is one of the state’s top-performing charter schools.

In recommending Voyager’s renewal, commission staff said the school’s academic performance over the past three years of its existing contract earned an average percentile ranking of 94 — meaning the school outperformed 94 percent of charter schools. Schools are evaluated annually on academic, organizational and financial performance.

Voyager’s application was the first to go before the commission. The panel voted on the length of the school’s new contract, but the terms and conditions are still to be determined, a commission spokeswoman said.

The commission entered into performance contracts with schools for the first time in 2013 in response to a state law aimed at reforming the charter system to better track academics and finances. But to allow for growing pains and because the academic benchmarks were still a work in progress at the time, no school faced potential revocation for inadequate performance.

Three-year contracts that all schools received in 2014 are set to expire in June. Contract lengths will be staggered between two and five years, based on performance, so that in the future all charters are not simultaneously up for renewal.

Once a contract length is approved, the commission “will work with each school to co-create academic renewal targets that will take into account the individual needs of the school and its student body,” Sione Thompson, the commission’s executive director, recently wrote in a memorandum to Commission Chairwoman Catherine Payne.

“The academic criteria that will be used to evaluate schools’ performance of the next contract … will be determined with the school during the spring of 2017, before the contract is signed,” Thompson wrote. “The co-created criteria must fit within sound research-based authorizer practices, contribute to the development of a high-quality charter school portfolio, and be premised upon the expectation that all students can attain high levels of achievement.”

Designed to be laboratories for innovation in public education, the state’s 34 charter schools enroll more than 10,600 students. (Only 33 schools have contracts expiring this year. The 34th and newest school, Ka‘u Learning Academy, was awarded a five-year contract in 2014 after completing the commission’s more rigorous application and startup process.)