County Takes Over Charter School
Police Remove Director From Hanover Campus
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 30, 2006

A charter school in Hanover has effectively ceased to exist as an independent entity following the removal of its director earlier this month by police at the request of the Anne Arundel school board.

Public school officials closed the Chesapeake Science Point Public Charter School on Monday. The campus reopened Tuesday with a new bell schedule, three new teachers and a changed lesson plan. Two administrators imported by the school system are running the school, and its founders say they have been shut out.

An investigative report on the ouster of Jon Omural, the school’s director, is due to be made public at week’s end and may help settle the issue of whether the school board’s actions were justified.

In a news briefing Tuesday, Superintendent Nancy Mann and School Board President Konrad Wayson said intervention was necessary to correct mounting problems at the privately run public school. Their investigation began with a union grievance and uncovered evidence, they said, of teacher harassment, seesawing class sizes, spotty attendance by students and teachers, and unkempt facilities.

“We had some teachers who didn’t understand that they had to be there the entire day,” said Ken Nichols, acting deputy superintendent of schools. “The part-time teacher was teaching more hours than some of the full-time teachers.”

The unrest at Chesapeake sets back the struggling charter education movement in Maryland. Charter schools have been slow to spread in the state; a dozen of them have opened in Baltimore, two in Anne Arundel and one in Frederick County. Many of them have squabbled with the school boards that granted their charters, including the Knowledge Is Power Program, an established, successful charter-school network that opened near Annapolis last fall.

Chesapeake’s founders allege, among other things, that the Anne Arundel school board has played favorites with KIPP, whose middle-grades operation has been allowed to function without interruption. Mann, the superintendent, contends that KIPP’s experienced leaders “knew what to do” and dealt with a handful of start-up problems “immediately.”

Founders of the Hanover school contend the school system has been against them from the beginning. They say that the complaints against Omural are petty, and that the remaining concerns were trumped up to justify a hostile takeover.

“We don’t have anyone in the school as of today,” said Al Aksakalli, a member of the charter school’s board. “If they want to make this work, they have to let us in.”

At the root of the dispute, sources said, is a clash of cultures and genders among the school staff.

Chesapeake was founded by a group that included several Turkish-American scholars, some of them professors at local universities. The director and four teachers were Turkish-American men, while the instructional leader and three remaining teachers were native-born American women.

The three female teachers filed a grievance two months ago with the county teachers union, alleging mistreatment by Omural. They said Omural allegedly retaliated against them. Among other things, the teachers accused Omural of denying them access to the Internet and of treating them as if they were of an inferior sex. Kisha Webster, the dean of students, said Omural narrowed her duties after she spoke out at a meeting of the charter school’s board. School leaders deny that.

Webster abruptly resigned in February, telling students in hand-delivered letters that she had “no trust and definitely no respect” for Omural and describing him as “inept.” On March 3, representatives of the teachers union met with school system officials and described deep “relationship problems” between the director and the female teachers. “The picture that was painted was fairly vivid,” Nichols said.

On March 6, three police cars arrived at the Hanover campus to relieve Omural of command. The school board imported a retired educator as acting principal. A subsequent investigation found teachers being assigned too many students, working erratic hours or assigned administrative duties, Nichols said. The rented classroom space allegedly required three days of cleaning because it was so dirty, he said.

“The only thing they did was buff the floors,” Aksakalli said.

The three teachers who filed the grievance were replaced. They were “insistent that they no longer be at the school,” Nichols said.

Founders of the charter school say the case against them doesn’t amount to much. They consider the allegations against the Turkish-American leadership by the non-Turkish teachers trivial at best, prejudiced at worst. They point out that most of the parents remain loyal, even after the disruptions of recent weeks. Eleven students have withdrawn since Omural’s removal, leaving enrollment at 108 at the middle school. Aksakalli says the school still has a waiting list. A handful of parents have complained to the school board; board members concur that most seem satisfied with the academic program.

School founders say the school system used the union grievance as a pretext to dismantle the school, essentially locking out its independent board, canceling after-school activities and clubs and installing a new class schedule that more closely resembles that of a standard middle school.

“We’ve asked for a meeting at least 15 times in the last two weeks. They’re not giving us an appointment,” Aksakalli said. “They’re not telling us what the charges against Jon [Omural] e. We don’t have a list; we don’t have anything.”