There just isn’t time to save kids from bad charter schools in Duval (rough draft)

That was the gist of Vitti’s answer to a question about how charter schools have greatly increased under his watch at about the 24 minute mark.

http://news.wjct.org/post/071515-superintendent-nikolai-vitti-environmental-symposium-blood-alliance-and-comedy-zone

Do you think the families of the children of the Acclaim charter school that closed in March wish he would have taken some time? There were plenty of warning signs too. The operator opened three charter schools in a year, had a bankruptcy and his day job was and I kid you not flipping schools.

Now he is right fighting the state is an uphill battle but putting in measures like charter boards have to have a percentage of local members and charter schools can't expand as long as they have sister schools that are failing are not. That would take a minute.

He also complained that fighting would cost money because of legal expenses, um, what are we paying Chastain the districts lawyer 122,000 dollars to do?

Then he says he has turned down more charter schools than his predecessors combined and that’s a fact. Some more facts are charter schools have more than doubled and that doesn’t include the ones that have been allowed to expand and how as a group they under-perform when compared to our public schools and yet another fact is he owes a lot to charter school proponents.

We also have more charter schools than most districts have schools. The amount of charter schools here in Jacksonville have increased nearly 400 percent from 9 to 35 in the last four years, admittedly Vitti has only been here for the majority of that time and they are a disaster that hurts, our community, teachers and worst of all our students.

He even admitted to you that local charters aren't doing as well (as a group) as our public schools. Well it seems to me that since that is the case maybe he should be making the time to make sure kids don't go to crappy ones or the ones that we because of siphoning away resources don't hurt the kids that remain behind.