Gettysburg denies increase in Vida Charter enrollment

The Gettysburg Area School District Board of Directors voted against a request Monday to add six enrollment spots to each the kindergarten and first-grade levels at the bilingual Vida Charter School.

Officials at Vida said that adding the 12 spots may soften the financial struggles in the future as class sizes shrink in later years.

Vida Executive Director Cynthia Maldonado told the board that she hopes to plump enrollment in kindergarten and first grade because those are the years where students have the easiest transition into a bilingual environment.

The charter functions as a total-immersion environment for Spanish-speaking students wishing to learn English.

Gettysburg board president Todd Orner asked the representatives of Vida of their certainty that the upper grades would eventually decrease in size.

“The assumption is you’ll have a consistent fall-off,” Orner said. “What if you don’t?”

It’s doubtful, Maldonado said, that the school wouldn’t see an attrition of students in the coming years, but also pointed out that she was only asking for 12 openings to her school.

Vida enrollment documentation over the past three years reflected that the upper grades lose close to 10 percent of students they began with at the kindergarten level, said Amanda Kittelberger, president of Vida’s school board.

Several members of the Gettysburg board said they were concerned that the enlarged class sizes had not been included in the Vida rechartering proposal two months ago.

Vida officials were advised by their legal council to defer the request until after the details of the charter had been negotiated and approved, Kittelberger said.

“Given they do work with a larger number of charters across the state, we went with that guidance,” Kittelberger said.

The members of the board almost unanimously voted nay to the charter amendment, with member Kathryn Hewitt submitting the lone yay vote.

Following the vote, Kittelberger said Vida representatives will be following up with legal council to determine a next step for the charter school.

The charter’s upcoming kindergarten class for the 2015-16 school year has 11 children on the wait list, Maldonado said, adding that parents and families will be disappointed by the decision.

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This article comes to us through a partnership between the Evening Sun and WITF.