Read the Contract to Operate Ohio’s First Public Boarding School
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Former Cintas Corporation CEO Richard Farmer helped get legislation to create the new boarding school passed.
The state Board of Education signed off Monday on an agreement to allow a Washington, D.C. nonprofit to run Ohio’s first public boarding school.
The school will be operated by the SEED Foundation, which already runs public boarding schools in Washington and Baltimore. It is slated to open in fall 2013.
While the contract makes it clear the school is a public school, it also includes some provisions that come up less frequently for traditional public schools.
The contract gives SEED the ability to shape future state rules that might affect the school before the rules are formally proposed.
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It also makes it clear that any material or technology SEED develops in order to run the school belong to SEED.
The contract allows the state Board of Education to close the school if it doesn’t meet certain academic goals. Those goals are supposed to be negotiated later on between Department of Education staff and SEED through a process of “mutual agreement.”
The school will be located in the Cincinnati area and be open only to “at-risk” students. That means students from low-income families who also meet other criteria such as such as having a record of suspensions or truancy or failing state reading or math tests.
As we explained earlier, Ohio will spend about $30,000 per student on the school, about three times the average per-student cost at other public high schools. The state will also pay part of the cost of building the school.
