Movement to start charter school grows

Efforts have begun in Freeport to establish a new charter school.

A charter school is a learning institution that, like a public school, receives funding from the government, but operates independently of the state school system.

Leading the charge for the new school is Craig Mercado, of Brooklyn, the former principal of St. Ephrem Catholic Academy in Brooklyn. Before his six-year tenure there, Mercado was an elementary school instructor and a high school English teacher at public and private schools in Brooklyn.

Now he is focused on establishing the Maven Charter Academy in Freeport. Mercado is one of four board members of Maven — a word which means “someone who is knowledgeable in something” — along with Patrick Fogarty, of Rockville Center, a teacher for nearly two decades who recently completed his doctorate at John Hopkins University’s School of Education, and who is now focused on recruiting other board members.

They intend to apply to the State University of New York, which has an approval process in place for charter schools, as early as June. If and when Maven is established, Mercado, who has a master’s from Fordham University in educational administration and supervision, plans to serve as its principal.

Asked why he identified Freeport as a potential location for a charter school, Mercado said, “Patrick and I went through a lot of areas to see where other charter schools were … and we based a lot of it on public test scores, to see what communities are underserved and what communities aren’t testing to the level that they probably should.”

Asked why the pair were drawn to a charter-school model instead of a traditional public school, Fogarty said, “I think the charter-school model is like a public school with lower overhead. And as a result, you have more flexibility. You have the ability to be a little more creative. … It gives you the opportunity to launch a school and manage it almost more like a small business than a large school district.”

Explaining the lower overhead, Fogarty added, “You’re staffing only based on need. We’re starting off small, and we’re going to add staff as we need it. We’re entirely enrollment-dependent. We have lower overhead as far as teachers that we hire — we’re not obligated to go with only union employees. That helps keep our costs down.”

“(You can) sort of cut the fat,” Mercado said. “It’s very hard to get too bloated. When you’re an entire district, that bloat can happen very easily.”

A common concern about a charter schools is that a portion of its state funding would come from money that is now going to the Freeport school district. The district, and parents who send their children to the village’s public schools, might not approve of that arrangement. But, Mercado said, the reality is more complicated.

“The money that the state sends goes with the child,” he explained. “Whether Archer Street or Giblyn gets money is based on their enrollment as well. We’re just an additional public school in that area … we’re just not under the Freeport unified district.”

Mercado emphasized that Maven would receive only 80 percent of the funding that a public school would receive per child enrolled. His view is that a charter school would be no more in competition with the district’s public schools district than the public schools compete with one another.

A petition the pair created has received over 100 signatures of support from village residents, and about a dozen local businesses have signed a separate letter of support.

Mercado and Fogarty will host a public meeting at the Freeport Memorial Library on May 15, at 7 p.m., and a Zoom meeting on May 22, at 7 p.m., the link for which can be found at MavenCharterAcademy.org/zoom.

Freeport School District officials did not respond to several requests for comment.