Oregon Department of Education

[September 20th, 2006] Imagine you owned a bar offering drinks and food nobody else served. Business boomed to the point where you wanted to expand, so you applied for a permit from the cops. But a few months later, on the eve of your expansion, police finally decided to respond—with a threat to shut you down.

Oh, and one more thing in this hypothetical situation: Imagine cops had gotten public funding to start a bar just like yours—and planned to restrict out-of-towners from coming to your tavern, even though they were your lifeblood.

Couldn't happen, right? Wrong.

On Aug. 29, the day before school began, Oregon Connections Academy, an online charter school based in Scio, just south of Salem, got a letter from this week's Rogue, the Oregon Department of Education.

The Scio district had granted Connections a charter in April 2005, and the school served more than 700 students last year from across Oregon.

Then, last April, Scio applied to the ODE for its state funding in 2006-2007. Four months later, the education department told the school it wouldn't get its funding, saying it was illegally admitting students on a first-come, first-served—rather than lottery—basis and required—rather than suggested—that parents serve as "learning coaches."

What the letter didn't mention is that 2005 legislation gave ODE $2 million to start its own "virtual academy" and decreed no online school could enroll more than half its students from outside its sponsoring school district's boundaries. (Connections, which gets most of its students from outside Scio, was subsequently grandfathered.)

The ed department's Randy Harnisch acknowledges that the legislation potentially put the department in competition with Connections and that the enrollment limits could have hurt Connections. But Harnisch denies intentionally muscling Connections to help the state's nascent online charter effort.

Connections' principal, Jim Thomas, isn't sure, saying, "It's tough to have a regulator who is also a competitor,"

Connections agreed to comply with the ODE letter last week and will get its money, Thomas says." We think they're wrong...but we had no choice."