“Imagine MASTer Academy has until November to complete its charter renewal application, and officials are getting anxious to get the process started.
The school board voted Wednesday to ask Ball State University, which authorized the charter school, for information about how to start the school’s charter renewal process.
Ball State must review charters every five years to determine whether to renew for one, two, three, four, five years or at all. Imagine MASTer Academy Principal Jim Huth said the renewal process has changed as a result of recent legislation, but the school has yet to receive information for how to proceed.
‘I don’t want to take any chances,’ he said.
If the Wells Street school’s charter is approved, Huth said the school would quickly ask for permission to start a high school.
ISTEP+
Huth reviewed ISTEP+ data with board members.
The school did not meet its federal No Child Left Behind benchmarks, Huth said.
But it did move up in the state’s ranking system from a ‘D’ school on academic watch to a ‘C’ school showing academic progress.
Huth said 80 percent of the students who had been with the school for three years passed the ISTEP+.
He told board members that he was impressed by the individual academic growth students were seeing each year.
Imagine MASTer Academy, which currently serves about 825 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, had its first day of school Wednesday, and Huth said the first day was “seamless.”
Imagine on Broadway
The Imagine Schools on Broadway board approved bonding for two new positions Tuesday and continued to solicit suggestions for a fifth board member.
Employee bonding, which protects the school in case an employee causes financial loss, must be recorded on the board’s minutes per procedural policy. The bonding was accepted for the charter school’s new business manager, Shelley Weisenberg, and its new treasurer, Larysa Thornsteinson.
At the end of the meeting, Board President Tony Booker invited fellow board members to offer a successor for Scott Lougheed, who resigned this summer. Booker said the board is ‘looking very actively for a replacement’ and asked fellow board members to propose potential candidates.
One board member, Mark Rosemond, told Booker he has two people in mind but would like to consult with them first before making a formal suggestion.
Lougheed’s letter of resignation cited ‘time constraints’ interfering with his board commitments, according to the principal’s office.”
Article published on August 18, 2011 by the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette