Petition for charter school focused on equity, inclusion denied by Petaluma City Schools board

A proposed 600-student charter school centered on equity and inclusion was rejected Monday after Petaluma City Schools leaders concluded school organizers didn’t understand the charter process, couldn’t resolve key questions about the proposal and were “demonstrably unlikely” to be successful.

Officials behind the Magnolia Global Academy for Leaders spent months building support for the planned grade 7-12 school, which promised to employ experiential learning and international travel as components of a learning environment rooted in themes of social justice.

But school leaders’ inability to overcome concerns about admissions criteria and a lack of specificity on everything from budgeting to the core vision of the school, cost them support from key progressive groups and from the Petaluma City Schools Board of Education, which unanimously rejected the proposal Monday evening.

Even an effort to get the board’s backing to partner with district staff to resolve outstanding issues appeared all but defeated at the close of the meeting.

“I was hoping to get some clarity and have some things resolved,” Board of Education President Joanna Paun said, detailing a litany of questions, including budgets, wages, benefits and facilities. “As much as we would like to collaborate, I don’t know how we can, because we don’t have any of those questions resolved.”

In comments during the meeting and in a phone interview afterward, the school’s Design Team lead Gianna Biaggi struck a hopeful, if defiant tone, asking the board to be “solutions oriented” and arguing that district staff should work with school organizers to tailor a revised proposal.

“This school is getting built. You have the choice to build it here or we will build it somewhere else,” Biaggi said at the meeting.

In an interview afterward, Biaggi said she was overwhelmed by support for the school, as parents and educators lined up to back the proposal during the public hearing portion of Monday’s special meeting.

Made up of a self-described cast of “prominent movers and shakers,” the leadership behind the proposed charter school boasts a substantial background in education, nonprofit and corporate settings. Among the group are trustees Jennifer Gray Thompson, executive director of Rebuild NorthBay Foundation; Yensi Jacobo, Petaluma People Services Center director of youth programs; Beth Fox, Sonoma Community Center director of development and marketing; and Jeanne Kearns, American Heart Association North Bay executive director.

Biaggi said she and other organizers declined to engage with district officials over missing information because they preferred the district help to get the proposal across the finish line.

“We felt, rather than get into a back-and-forth, it was best to move toward working in partnership,” Biaggi said after the meeting. “The goal was always to get the district to work in partnership. We can’t answer those questions without their input.”

It’s unclear how common it is for California school districts to partner with private outside groups to establish so-called dependent charter schools, but in a staff report recommending rejection of the Magnolia petition, Petaluma City Schools officials called the setup legally questionable.

“We question the legality of a group of individuals unaffiliated with the district petitioning the board to open a new school that the board has not determined it has the financial capability to operate and staff consistent with district standards,” according to the staff report first distributed Oct. 29. “Therefore, the concept behind the petition is legally flawed and thus operationally unsound as proposed.”

Biaggi told board members that lawyers affiliated with Magnolia had different legal opinions, but did not offer rebuttal or clarification on that question, or on other key details that district leaders said were missing from the proposal, which was submitted Aug. 27.

The 500-page plan, district officials said, provided unrealistic financial assumptions, didn’t adequately describe how transportation would be provided and failed to identify a location for the proposed charter school. School leaders promised to secure $250,000 in seed money through a fundraising effort district officials described as “speculative at best,” and the details of the school’s admissions policies left some, including district leadership, doubtful that the school could successfully field the type of diversity organizers said they would seek.

“There is uncertainty as to whether the charter school’s parental/guardian participation expectations may result in deterring certain families, e.g., migrant, English learner, and socioeconomically disadvantaged, from seeking admission to the charter school, potentially resulting in a discriminatory impact on those student subgroups … and impact the ability of the charter school to serve the needs of the student groups identified in the petition,” according to the district staff report.

In urging the Petaluma City Schools Board of Education to bypass the staff recommendation for denial, the school’s supporters sought to highlight what they saw as an opportunity to meet the needs of Sonoma County and Petaluma students – and to change lives in the process.

With plans to serve as many as 600 students in grades 7-12, Magnolia Global Academy would have become the seventh secondary school within the 7,500-student Petaluma City Schools district, which is the second-largest in Sonoma County.

In her comments to the board, Biaggi, a Sonoma native, said “there is no high school like MGAL in our community,” and promised there would be appetite for the model beyond Petaluma’s borders.

“The MGAL team is not giving up,” Biaggi said afterward, while stressing the importance of the district working with school leadership to build out the program. “We know that there is a deep need for our school in this community. I understand this need. If Petaluma is not willing to work with us, we will go to another district. But this school is getting built in Sonoma County.”

Although many, including school board members, lauded the vision for the school, there was hesitance to commit support for the proposal that was viewed as light on details.

Speaking on behalf of North Bay LGBTQI Families, which declined to endorse the school, Sal Andropoulos said the lack of specifics about how the school’s large, complex an somewhat evolving vision would be implemented, and they expressed concern that the vision wasn’t more solidified among school leadership.

“The over reliance on community input on foundational things they should be better versed on … we’re not confident the support will materialize,” Andropoulos said.

Petaluma City Schools Board member Sheldon Gen said after reading every page of the proposal and staff recommendation, and every email for and against, he was struck by one comment, from a person who described the Magnolia Academy’s petition as a love letter for Petaluma.

“That resonated. That was the closest to what I was feeling when I read the petition,” Gen said. “It didn’t stand as strong as a proposal for a school. But an expression of values for the school … a school focused on equity and inclusivity, I think all of us, we want a district centered on it.”

Tyler Silvy is editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Reach him at tyler.silvy@arguscourier.com, 707-776-8458, or @tylersilvy on Twitter.