Amid Appeal, Charter Applicant Says It Won’t Give Up

An Arizona-based charter school operator says it won’t give up on expanding into Nashville. Great Hearts Academies is appealing a rejection from the Metro School Board this month. Even if it doesn’t win approval this year, Great Hearts says it won’t walk away.

As a charter, Great Hearts would be privately led, but still receive public money. Its CEO says opening later than next year in Nashville would still be worth it, because thousands of parents have shown interest. Chris Strong is one of them.

Strong says she’d like to see Great Hearts as an option for her younger kids, after her oldest son spent a couple years at a south Nashville high school with discipline problems.

“The kids will tell you, there’s 10 percent of the kids who are really bad, and those are the ones that are running the school, not the administrators and not the teachers. It’s a bad situation, and it has to change because I will not send one of my children there.”

Great Hearts would like to set up five schools around Metro, each with slots for around 400 elementary students, and more than 500 in middle and high school.

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Great Hearts’ CEO says they’re clarifying parts of the application to do with school location and transportation. Those are delicate subjects in Metro because they come with racial and potentially legal concerns. But CEO Daniel Scoggin figures it’ll be worth resolving, calling Nashville a quote “perfect place for Great Hearts to be.”

“So if we’re not able to open schools in 2013 or are not approved at this time, that doesn’t mean that Great Hearts is going away. We would come back and reapply when the time is right. So it’s not a matter of ‘if’ – it’s more a matter of ‘when.’

Next week is the deadline for Great Hearts’ appeal, which the Metro school board could take up later this month. Great Hearts could also appeal to the state, but has said it will not, because doing so wouldn’t leave enough time to set up a school for next year.