The superintendent in Williamson County does not want charter schools to start opening in his district. Officials there received a letter of intent from a farmer who wants public funding to run a school his own way in one of Tennessee’s best districts.
Schools in affluent Williamson County are the envy of other districts, and often at the top of the list for statewide test scores. Superintendent Mike Looney argues opening charters would only take away from traditional public schools.
“I believe that charter schools dilute the few resources that we have. You know, our operational expenses don’t go down – we still have to pay the utility bill, we still have to pay the payment on the buildings that we’ve constructed, we still to have have buses. So you take those few dollars and you send them or divert them to another place – you know, money’s tight and it’s gonna make it tighter.”
The full charter application is due later this spring. Tennessee already has about fifty charter schools, and more on the way, mostly in urban districts like Metro.
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