STEM Academy adds high school grades
<p>In this file photo taken in May 2013, Garrett Moen, 13, a seventh-grade student at the North Idaho STEM Charter Academy in Rathdrum, pours plaster into a footprint at a mock crime scene during a crime scene investigation course taught by the Idaho State Police. Students learned about fingerprinting, documenting a crime scene, the importance of math and science, and how to gather evidence.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - Beginning this fall, North Idaho STEM Academy will open the doors on its Rathdrum campus to high school students.
The K-8 charter school was recently granted permission by the state to add grades nine through 12, despite objections by local school district officials, who claim it will hurt the education system by deflecting state funding away from the existing public high schools.
"First and foremost was our responsibility to the parents of our kids," said Scott Thomson, principal of the school.
Thomson and his wife, Colleen,both educators who formerly taught in the Lakeland School District, founded the popular school. It offers science and math focused project-based learning, and opened in 2012 at full capacity. The current waiting list is 200.
"This expansion is an answer to the repeated, and constant, requests from our patrons, community and business leaders as well as the Charter Commission's own concerns during the authorization process about what would happen to our eighth-graders after years of being in a school with a dynamic, project-based STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) program," wrote Thomson, in a letter to the Idaho Public Charter School Commission.
The expansion will increase the school's enrollment from 315 to 724 students over the next nine years.
"This is just organic growth," Thomson said. "We're not asking for new kids to come to our schools."
The school will begin serving ninth-grade students in the fall, and add another grade each consecutive year.
In a November letter to the charter school commission, Lakeland School District Superintendent Mary Ann Ranells said that she and her district's trustees were surprised by the STEM charter school's state request to expand.
"Increasing the charter's enrollment by an additional 409 students will divert funding from Lakeland's public schools, putting programs at risk and making inefficient use of tax dollars," Ranells wrote. "Creating three undersized public high schools in the community with redundant administrative staff and overhead is contradictory to saving tax dollars."
When a child leaves a traditional school district to attend a public charter school in Idaho, the charter school receives the state funds the local school district would have received to educate that student.
Tom Taggart, the Lakeland School District's business director, estimates the district lost about 130 students to the charter school when it opened. That translates into about $450,000 for the school district in annual state support.
Taggart said the district had just adjusted to the initial financial hit from the school's 2012 opening when they learned of the expansion plan.
"Current state policy ends up pitting local districts against new charters due mainly to financial impacts," Taggart told The Press. "If there was some recognition that this does cause a hardship on districts and some form of transition funding was provided, it would go a long way to improving these relationships."
Both Ranells and Taggart had high praise for the school and the Thomsons, despite their concerns.
"STEM is a good school run by excellent educators. I am not directing my concerns at them, but rather at the negative consequences resulting from the funding methods," Taggart said.