Anyone who’s heard me talk about Harpswell Coastal Academy has heard me say, “I’m not an advocate of charter schools, nor am I an enemy of charter schools.”

I’ve urged supporters to avoid the politics and focus on doing the best we possibly can within the constraints of the process to create a school that everyone in the Midcoast could be proud to call a public school.

A public charter school law is simply a set of structures that enables new public schools to start. Maine law basically provides three things: a way for schools to be authorized, an oversight mechanism and a funding mechanism. Maine’s law has been lauded as a commonsense, equitable model of how to be fair to existing public schools while enabling communities to innovate.

But as public charter schools try to get a foothold, the funding mechanism is under attack.

Three funding bills are being addressed at a public hearing at 1 p.m. Monday in Room 202 of the Cross Office Building in Augusta. Regrettably, the debate is going to be framed as “choice” vs. “status quo.”

Rabid free-marketers and lobbyists for private out-ofstate “virtual” schools will line up against the Maine Education Association and public school lobbyists to convince legislators to alter the law to benefit their clients.

But what if, instead of a boxing match, a public policy debate broke out?

The founders of Harpswell Coastal Academy have always believed the conversation need not be “public schools” vs. “charter schools.”

Let’s agree — 95 percent of the public school teachers, parents and students I’ve worked with do agree — our existing public schools are doing the very best they can in very challenging circumstances. These same folks agree that — due to forces often beyond the control or purview of a traditional public school — they cannot meet the needs of all students.

Once agreed, the question becomes: What public policy choices are likely to produce better results for more young people?

After 15 years of debate, lawmakers here passed LD 1533 two years ago, 88 to 51, with support from Democrats and Republicans, making Maine the 41st state to allow public charter schools.

For a public charter school to exist, it needs to be authorized. Maine provides two paths: through a school district, or via the State Charter Commission.

As a longtime public education advocate, my strong preference had been to partner with a school district such as School Administrative District 75, or Brunswick.

We formally approached SAD 75 Superintendent Brad Smith and Brunswick Schools Superintendent Paul Perzanoski early on. Both politely and respectfully declined.

As someone who was part of the startup of Casco Bay High School in Portland and Poland Regional High School in Poland, I know it requires students and public money that previously had gone to other schools.

While I fully understand the fears that such initiatives trigger in superintendents who are trying to make a very challenging budget situation work, I ultimately think it’s better for local districts to be the authorizer of — and therefore a stakeholder in — all the public schools that serve their students.

Only when the door for this partnership closed did we choose the second option: the Charter Commission.

Parents, community leaders, educators and donors who’ve worked for most of the past two years on Harpswell Coastal Academy thought the politics were behind us and we could begin enrolling students, hiring teachers and leasing space.

Unfortunately, that is not the case, for several reasons.

While every “bricks and mortar” charter school must be run by an independent board, the LePage administration has been focused on using the charter law to allow for-profit out-of-state “virtual charters.” Many Mainers and school reform experts are alarmed: We can see the “virtual,” but not the “public” or even the “school.”

The Maine Charter Commission, following the letter and spirit of the authorizing law, rejected two out-of-state virtual applications. Lumping these “innovations” in with public charter schools triggered fears in public school advocates that all charter schools are out to privatize education.

Then there is the ongoing fiasco of the Baxter Academy in Portland. Whether that board is able to regroup remains to be seen, but this has kept charter schools in the news in a way that causes doubt about Baxter, the commission and the concept in general.

The recent election returned Democratic majorities to the House and Senate, but I’m discouraged that one of the results has been the introduction of bills designed to give charter schools no realistic chance to succeed.

The underlying, debatable assumption by those opposed to public charter schools seems to be that Maine’s school children should now and forever go only to schools that look pretty much like the ones they go to now.

Given empirical data that supports the growing rate at which parents and teachers are leaving the traditional school system, and the anecdotal evidence of students and business leaders averring that such schools are not meeting their needs, such an approach seems short-sighted.

Almost a quarter of the students who’ve declared an intent to enroll in HCA are currently either in private schools or home-schooled — students returning to or joining the public school system for the first time.

The standard argument is that “charter schools siphon money away from public schools.” That’s misleading at best. Maine’s five charter schools are public schools, governed by the same authorities — the Legislature, the State Board of Education and the U.S. Department of Education — as any other school in Maine.

A more accurate statement would be: The charter law provides a way to reallocate only a portion of the public money used to educate children, from one public institution to another.

By leaving out this important fiscal fact, it becomes easier to stoke fear, and has motivated legislators to introduce bills that would gut public charter schools’ ability to succeed.

Currently, Harpswell Coastal Academy is to receive only a portion of the combined state and local funding that normally goes to the resident district. The exact allocation per student varies by district, and by student. For HCA, we’ve estimated it’s $7,500 to $8,200.

For the current school year, the four districts from which HCA is likely to draw students have a per-pupil operating cost of nearly $11,000 to over $12,000. If you count other revenue in a district’s budget that does not figure into that cost, those numbers rise to $13,000 to $14,000.

LD 533 — “An Act To Eliminate the Requirement That Local Funding Follow a Pupil to a Charter School” — would reduce the per-student amount allotted HCA, to between $3,000 and $4,000. It also would penalize poorer districts more than wealthier ones, because poorer districts get a greater share of their funding from the state.

The net effect would make public charter schools fiscally impossible.

Meanwhile, LD 889 proposes that the school unit in which a student resides forwards only half its per-pupil allocation to the public charter school. This would produce a slightly higher and more predictable — but equally inequitable and fiscally absurd — funding scheme.

Whether you are a legislator, a parent, a taxpayer or a student, our idea is that a promising public education policy has a chance to take root. It will be more likely to do so if the folks who make policy can be informed from a place that’s not rooting for one side or another.

JOHN D’ANIERI is Head of School for Harpswell Coastal Academy.