Up North Progressive

So you have an alternative education program in a small Northern Michigan town with a dedicated teaching staff and successful program with over 100 students enrolled consistently year after year. There’s just no way you could possibly screw this up, right?

There is a way, and Ludington Area Schools did just that this summer when they decided to no longer support Journey Junior Senior High School. This past June, Journey closed their doors forever, despite having good attendance. The students of this alternative education program must now find a new school for the 2015-2016 school year. Their former principal, Jamie Bandstra, won’t be sitting idle however. He’s now president and future superintendent of a new for-proft charter school called Gateway To Success, with plans to open in Scottville in the fall of 2016.

Will Gateway be just like Journey? No. The charter school will offer “project-based” education to students grades 6-12 and not just be for at-risk students, which means the unique school culture created by Journey’s alternative education program will not exist at the for-profit charter school. The school will be located at the former Foster’s Market in Scottville. Here’s a picture of what it looks like right now, and an artist’s rendering of what it will look like when students enroll in the fall of 2016:

Of course, one thing still in the way of this project being successful is money. For-profit charter schools get taxpayer money for teaching the students, then only use a portion of it for the kids because the management company has to make a profit managing the school. Bandstra and the for-profit charter school board currently need about $1.5 million more dollars in start up money, despite donations and $350,000 received from the state of Michigan. This is the only way the state still admits charter schools are not real public schools, they have to raise funds from private sources to start their school.

So while this new charter school tries to figure out ways to convince the local community a new charter school is just what Scottville needs, the local community needs to remember that two for-profit charter schools opened in the area before and both closed down from lack of students, which means the management company couldn’t make a profit from managing the school.

And no one in Scottville has paid attention to the enormous mess only a few miles away in Traverse City where another for-profit charter school, Grand Traverse Academy, struggles with what to do about a loss of $1.6 million from a total of $3.5 million embezzled by their former management company, Smart Schools LLC, because the owner of that company was convicted of federal felony fraud in March of 2015. Both this blog and Miss Fortune have covered the catastrophe extensively. How do more people not know what a rip off for-profit charter schools are?

As for the former students of Journey High School, the new charter school president can give them pizza parties and tell them how great this new charter school will be a whole year away into the future, but these kids still have a year of school to attend before they can go to Bandstra’s shiny new grocery store turned institution of learning. They have a year to settle into a new school, make new friends, and connect with a new school culture. A year from now, many of Journey’s former students may decide they like the school they’re going to, so why switch to a new school?

And that’s for the students who do have the option of attending a different school. Many students who attend alternative education programs do so because no other school will enroll them due to behavior issues or juvenile criminal records. This is why they are called at-risk students and need schools like Journey.

Something’s just not right about this new charter school plan. Why would a school district with a successful alternative ed program toss it aside and pursue something that needs millions to launch and may not even be able to open next year? What or whom convinced Jamie Bandstra and Ludington Area Schools to make such a poor choice for their students? Perhaps that answer can be found in the downstate management company working to open Gateway To Success Academy. We’ll take a closer look at Castlebond Enterprises LLC next time.