Letters: Law requiring $1 school sales is ripe for abuse

I generally don’t have a problem with charter schools when they are properly regulated. I think that they can hold an important place in K-12 education (although I do question whether Indiana properly regulates its charters).

When IPS (or any other Indiana school district) is forced to sell its properties for $1, it impedes the district’s ability to get its job done [“Indiana attorney general asks court to block sale of two IPS buildings,” IBJ.com, Sept. 14]. Districts should be able to sell old school properties to developers for the market value of the land.

Many old school district buildings are inappropriate for small charter schools anyway; they’re often old and require a lot of maintenance, while being entirely too large for a charter school to fully occupy. And because Indiana law doesn’t specifically mandate that schools are leased to charter operators for $1 (rather than leased or purchased for $1), the system is ripe for abuse by charter “schools” that are more interested in real estate than acting as a school.

If Indiana wanted to maximally support charter schools and school districts, it would use surplus money to build surplus classrooms onto operating schools and to expand the scope of new school construction/expansion projects to include surplus classrooms. By law, such surplus space should be considered to be “community space” that allow charter school use during school hours, community college and extracurricular use after school hours and miscellaneous community use during weekends and holidays.

At the end of the day, classrooms are classrooms. There is no reason why charters should be given sweetheart deals to acquire their own building; it adds unnecessary overhead to charters and kneecaps school districts.

The $1 law is terrible for its intended purpose.

–Robert Hart