School administrators who have been working hard to secure permission to found four charter schools watched Thursday as their projects were rejected. A fifth school may soon join them.

Over the past few months, six prospective Hawaii public charter schools sought approval from state commissioners to move forward with their plans to develop alternative, publicly funded places of learning.

But the state’s eight-member Charter School Commission denied four of the applications on Thursday for reasons ranging from insufficient planning to failure to integrate Hawaii’s culture into the learning model. These schools would be brand-new and for now exist in concept only.

Representatives from some of the schools attended a packed meeting Thursday in the Hawaii Department of Education building in Honolulu, some of them in tears as they criticized the newly developed evaluation process and questioned its fairness.

The evaluations “convinced us we were incompetent, incapable, unskilled and totally naive,” said Sheila Buyukacar, who hoped to become a top administrator at IMAG Academy, a K-12 charter school in Waipahu that would have focused on community service. The school’s request was denied Thursday. “We even started to doubt ourselves,” she said.

She said the evaluation process was unfair.

A fifth applicant — the prospective North Shore Middle School — is also looking at a likely rejection, but commissioners on Thursday deferred their decision on it until a later date because of how popular the school’s concept is and how controversial rejecting it might be. (The commissioners were also running out of time because of a scheduling conflict for the board room and had to leave enough time to address other matters on the agenda.) The school, which would incorporate lots of technology and encourage students to learn through classroom projects, also applied unsuccessfully for a charter last year.

The commission’s decisions this year offer a window into the state’s changing charter school landscape as well as some evolving tensions in Hawaii’s growing alternative-learning community.

They also reflect the increasing rigor of the state’s charter-school vetting process — a transformation that officials say can be painful for visionaries but that is necessary to improve accountability and educational quality.

The only applicant to get a green light on Thursday was Kau Learning Academy, a school that hopes to be established in Naalehu.

Three charter schools have previously tried and failed to set up shop in Kau, a high-needs, impoverished region that encompasses the Big Island’s southeastern corridor where as much as a third of the population is Micronesian. The school would focus on helping integrate members of its under-served community.

Commissioners reasoned that the academy will incorporate both online and classroom learning and that it fulfills all the criteria necessary to create a successful school. They commended the upcoming school’s team for its organization and well-thought-out plan. The academy will serve grades kindergarten through six before gradually adding two more grades.

An Elaborate Application

The state charter school law is constantly being amended, and the charter application has gone through many iterations in the last two decades. This year’s version is designed to make it particularly challenging for a prospective school to satisfy all the rigorous metrics.

“Part of the context here is that the commission has considerably raised the bar for approval even from the last cycle (last year), which was already raised to a degree, certainly compared to years past,” Tom Hutton, the executive director of the commission, told Civil Beat. “It’s not unique to Hawaii. In the charter school world before, the premise was, ‘let it all start and then weed out the bad ones later.’”

Hawaii is home to 33 charter schools serving about 9,800 students. Approximately half of the schools are on the Big Island.

Growth in charter schools since 1994:

Hutton stressed that charter schools are public institutions that have a fiscal responsibility to taxpayers. He pointed to what he sees as evidence that Hawaii is moving in the right direction, including a recent state auditor’s report that lauded the commission’s commitment to accountability and transparency and the national recognition recently awarded to state Sen. Jill Tokuda for her work to improve Hawaii’s charter school system.

Denial of charter applications is not unusual, in part because the commission has, in recent years, gotten more selective. Tokuda and other lawmakers have repeatedly refined the state’s charter law, and those efforts have translated into a tougher application process.

Last year, just two of the six charter school applicants were approved: Kaimuki’s School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability, or SEEQS, and Waimanalo’s Malama Honua. And, as commissioners regularly note, SEEQS was initially recommended for refusal and only got approved at the 11th hour after lengthy discussions.

The Charter School Commission is in charge of determining which aspiring applicants should be entrusted with public funds. Its application subcommittee is made up of three members who make recommendations to the whole commission. Those recommendations are based on a report put together by two evaluation teams that are made up of regular staff members and others who come from outside the commission. That report is also vetted by commission staff members, including Hutton, who are not on the teams.

The most recent version of the application consists of more than 300 pages. It asks applicants to ensure that every ‘i’ is dotted and every ‘t’ is crossed, as several commissioners noted. It’s a back-and-forth vetting process that lasts months; the current application period started last October.

“The application looks like it’s a beast. It’s a very difficult process, and it’s not unintentional,” Hutton said, noting that a school that satisfied last year’s criteria wouldn’t necessarily make the cut this year. It “forces a lot of applicant groups to figure out a lot of things on the front end.”

“The application is the game, and the rest is all refereeing,” he said, quoting Commissioner Curtis Muraoka, who serves on the commission’s Applications Committee and is co-director of West Hawaii Explorations Academy, a Kailua-Kona charter school.

Tough Love

The commission’s reasons for rejecting the four — and potentially five — applicants this year varied, but all the arguments point to the need to ensure every public school is destined for success and not failure.

“If a school fails, it’s going to fail the community,” said commission Vice Chairman Peter Tomozawa who’s also the executive director of business development for the City and County of Honolulu. Tomozawa is one of the few commissioners who thinks North Shore Middle School should be approved.

But most commissioners remained skeptical of the North Shore Middle School application, stressing that the institution wouldn’t have a large enough budget to support all of the work that its would-be administration is proposing for its teachers and that it would rely too heavily on volunteers, commissioners said.

Dali Pyzel, a former teacher who would be charged with leading North Shore Middle School, testified tearfully at Thursday’s meeting, saying that the school has made every effort to comply with the commission’s criteria and address the issues that disqualified its application last year.

Pyzel even started an online petition on the website Change.org that asks the state Charter School Commission to improve the process by which it evaluates school applications and ensure the evaluation teams stick to published criteria. As of Thursday afternoon, the petition had nearly 300 signatures.

Sen. Clayton Hee, a former educator whose district covers Oahu’s North Shore, also attended the meeting, telling commissioners that the school’s focus on volunteers — which some commissioners said was particularly troubling — is an asset, not a burden.

“If we can get it together and paddle the canoe together — instead of telling the paddlers ‘why aren’t they paddling fast enough?’ — let’s (do it),” he said. “If I thought they (the school) didn’t have a chance, I wouldn’t sit before you here.”

The school has garnered widespread support from members of the North Shore community, whose two existing public middle schools are 18 miles apart and both located within high schools. But commission officials, who acknowledged the support, said the community’s need isn’t enough of a reason to justify the school’s approval.

“A community’s desire for a school — even the need for a school — isn’t exactly the criteria,” Hutton told Civil Beat. “At the end of the day, that doesn’t get you there if the application isn’t solid enough.”

Still, Pyzel suggested that her school would have been approved if applicant reviewers had followed the criteria put forth. She pointed out that, after last year’s rejection, she and her colleagues hired both mainland and local consulting firms and addressed all the questions expressed last year.

“It seems a little fishy to me that we wouldn’t meet any of the (criteria),” she told Civil Beat.

Other failed applicants complained about the evaluation process too.

The evaluation teams failed to interact with applicants enough during the evaluation process, said Buyukacar, of IMAG Academy. She said she wasn’t given an opportunity to respond to concerns raised about her application or correct false assumptions of commission staffers that became clear from their original report.

Commission officials responded by saying they restrict the information they use to the applications to ensure schools are absolutely ready to move forward by the time they apply.

IMAG Academy’s application “seemed to be a plan for a plan rather than the plan being here and now,” Hutton said. “This application needs a lot of work before it’s ready for prime time.”

Justin Lolofie, who has been working with the proposed Montessori of Oahu School but who clarified that he was speaking on his own behalf, agreed with Buyukacar, questioning the rule against new information. By prohibiting applicants from amending their proposals, the process allows initial reviewers to pick and choose which information to retain for the commission, he said.

But commissioners said the issues with the Montessori school’s application are philosophical, too.

Montessori is an alternative educational model that promotes customized, hands-on learning and strives to create a community of children who matriculate through school together from kindergarten. The proposed school’s preferential enrollment policy and lack of a solid plan for special education and English-language learners, some commissioners said, is antithetical to the mission of public schools. Most — but not all — Montessori schools in the country are private.

Representatives of the proposed Montessori school said they planned on adjusting their proposal but were prevented from doing so. They said they — just like most of this year’s applicants — intend to apply again next year.

The other two applicants who were denied this year are iLEAD Kauai, the product of a mainland charter management organization, and Hawaii Arts Repertoire & Tech, which would serve the Kona Area.

• Contact Alia Wong via email at awong@civilbeat.com or Twitter at @aliaemily.