Schools and communities are being "left in the dark" about state school to charter school conversion, the secondary schools union leader says.
After a meeting with Act New Zealand leader David Seymour, NZ Post Primary Teachers’ Association Te Wehengarua president Chris Abercrombie said he received no answers to questions about the conversion process yesterday.
Mr Abercrombie said he questioned Mr Seymour about what the conversion would mean for school zoning, property, community access to schools, for the communities’ voice in the process, for the governance of schools and their obligations to enrol pupils.
"Unfortunately he couldn’t give us any answers and his reasoning for that was the legislative process."
However, something Mr Seymour did say was that the process was moving very fast, Mr Abercrombie said.
"We are very concerned about that, because at the moment we don’t have any detailed answers to our questions and it really feels like schools and communities are being left in the dark with this process."
A lot of money was being siphoned off in the "charter school experiment" and school communities had not been involved or consulted.
"It’s just really concerning that this really significant shift in our public education system ... is just being done in the dark. There’s potentially billions of dollars on the line here."
Mr Abercrombie said Mr Seymour told him there would be a charter school approval board that would make decisions based on feedback and information they were given.
There would also have to be community support for a conversion to happen.
Schools were hubs for their communities and hosted events on site often.
However, Mr Abercrombie said it was not clear, from the meeting, if they would be able to continue to do so.
