Stephen Bilotta

I oppose this bill. Why is this bill HB1358 being introduced? There is not a clear explanation as to what problem(s) converting public schools to charter schools would solve. There has been no data shown that would justify using up government resources to research all the legal and procedural requirements for this type of conversion. Also, this is an extremely complicated process and to expect to have recommendations by January 1, 2027 would be extremely difficult if not completely impossible. It would be much better to research on ways to improve the current public school systems. For these reasons alone, this bill should not even be considered. Other problems I see with this bill is that it lowers the threshold for a town to convert a public school to a charter from a two-thirds town meeting super-majority to a simple majority at a general election. This bill would also completely eliminate democratically elected municipal school boards and teachers' union contracts, replacing them with independent privately-operated, highly deregulated charter boards. Proponents of this bill imply charter schools as having higher test scores but charter schools populations are a self-selected group of students and so the data is biased toward higher scores. Before any resources are expended by the state, we would need to see unbiased, well designed neutral test data supported by the educational community as fair and just. We favor local governance such that parents of students can have direct access to policies and problems whereas private schools have a state charter and little to no local control. Charter schools do not face the same oversight as public schools and are therefore not beholden to the parents of students and taxpayers. This could lead to nonstandard accounting and other problems that are not acceptable but are not reported so it would be difficult to catch. For these reasons and more I OPPOSE HB1358.