10/28/08

Columbus Dispatch

Catherine Candisky

Interim Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers will continue her predecessor’s effort of trying to shut down poor-performing charter schools under Ohio’s charitable trust law.

Rogers’s office is appealing a Montgomery County court ruling that rejected the attorney general’s effort to close a Dayton charter school for failing grades.

Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Tucker dismissed the case Sept. 25, finding that “the attorney general has no statutory or common law charitable trust oversight authority” over the schools.

New Choices, a tax-funded, privately operated charter school was one of four targeted by former Attorney General Marc Dann, under a deal with the Ohio Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union and a vocal critic of charter schools.

Dann engaged a novel legal theory - one that state attorneys discussed at length with union lawyers - that the schools, as nonprofit entities, could be closed for not fulfilling their stated charitable purpose: to educate children. Each of the schools had received failing marks on state report cards.

Decisions are pending in lawsuits against two other schools, and the fourth has since closed.