Cuccinelli weighs in on Patrick Henry School

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has blocked an attempted end run by Del. Joe Morrissey around the Richmond Public Schools charter school agreement with Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts.

March 6, 2010; 10:43 AM • by Chris Dovi

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has blocked an attempted end run by Del. Joe Morrissey around the Richmond Public Schools charter school agreement with Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts.

Last month, Morrissey (D- Henrico) sought Cuccinelli’s opinion on that contract and its requirement that Patrick Henry founders bring their 80-year-old former public school building into full compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act before the school’s planned opening this July.

In a brief, three-page opinion released March 4, Cuccinelli rejects Morrissey’s attempts to lawyer Patrick Henry’s way out of having to pay for or complete the agreed-to renovations of the old Patrick Henry Elementary School on Semmes Avenue near Forest Hill Park.

“It is my opinion that the provision of the charter agreement between the School Board of the City of Richmond and the Patrick Henry School of Science about which you inquire does not conflict with [Virginia law],” Cuccinelli writes, indicating that nothing in current Charter School laws prevents Richmond Schools from requiring Patrick Henry to meet federal standards for access to people with disabilities.

Richmond Public Schools is subject to a legally binding settlement agreement requiring that it bring its own facilities into full compliance with that federal law. The suit, settled in 2006, was filed because only a handful of Richmond’s nearly 50 school buildings met basic accessibility requirements.

After nearly four years of a snail-paced approach to those repairs, the district remains only in the first year of the agreed-to five-year schedule of repairs.

In seeking Cuccinelli’s opinion, Morrissey suggested that Richmond’s own procrastination should provide some leniency to Patrick Henry, but Cuccinelli rejected this argument, as well as Morrissey’s suggestion that Richmond was illegally applying a “financial disincentive” to Patrick Henry’s founding.

State law says “[f]unding and service agreements between local school boards and public charter schools shall not provide a financial incentive or constitute a financial disincentive to the establishment of a public charter school…”, but Cuccinelli writes that such a stipulation applies only to operating costs and not to start-up.

Cuccinelli also rejected a suggestion that industry-standard lease agreements rarely require tenants to do substantial repairs to an owner’s property to meet ADA requirements.

Cuccinelli agreed with the latter suggestion, but indicated that the signed agreement Patrick Henry has with Richmond, while not typical of such agreements, remains legally binding.

For the time being, Morrissey’s question and Cuccinelli’s answer remain, to some degree, moot. Richmond has granted Patrick Henry a charter contract, but the district has yet to sign a lease agreement allowing the charter school’s founders to take full possession of the building or to affect any of the renovations stipulated in the charter contract.

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