Newberry Education First answers questions in town hall meeting 

Newberry Education First held a town hall meeting on Friday to answer community questions about the initiative to convert Newberry’s three schools into charter schools. Parents and teachers flooded the Mentholee Norfleet Municipal Building to ask how they and their students would be affected if the school votes succeed. 

“Newberry parents, teachers, staff and residents, we know how special our community is,” Joel Searby, an NEF board member, said in the meeting. “But keeping up and keeping our schools great has been a challenge lately and over the last several years.” 

The voting to remove each school from Alachua County Public Schools will take place in April, and each household will have one vote per school where it has a child enrolled. State statute requires at least half of a school’s households to vote in order for the election to succeed, and a successful conversion requires at least half of the votes to be in favor. 

Teachers will also get one vote each, and any failure to vote will count as a vote against the effort. 

Each school’s future is determined by a separate vote, so the campaign could convert one, two, all three or none of the schools. Regardless, Searby said all current students would be automatically accepted into the new schools. 

If all three schools were converted, the 2025-26 kindergarten class would be the first to introduce the charter efforts to defeat overcrowding. Beginning with that class, the proposed Newberry school system would automatically accept children who live within the city limits of Archer or Newberry.  

Siblings of current students would receive second priority. For example, a student at Archer Elementary School whose sibling attends Oak View would receive preference in an Oak View application. Searby said NEF wants to keep families together, and as the plan is still flexible, that preference could become a guarantee if parents want that in the state application. 

Searby said many portions of the plan are still up in the air until after the vote, an aspect that has caused some confusion in the community. He said if the parent and teacher votes are successful, they will kick off a process to create an application with finalized plans. 

Searby introduced the process in four phases. Phase 1 is voting, with dates to be set by the schools. Phase 2 is slated for roughly May through November, giving parents time to discuss how they want the specifics to look as they draft an application to the state charter review commission. 

Searby clarified in the town hall meeting that the charter review commission, not the School Board of Alachua County (SBAC) has the authority to approve the charter application. He also strongly encouraged parents to reach out and get involved with NEF. 

“We want you to shape the kinds of schools that you, as parents and teachers, believe we need to have,” Searby said. 

Phase 3 is implementation, working with the school board to negotiate the transition. During that time, the SBAC and NEF would need to work out the shift in leadership and what assets, such as magnet programs, would remain at the schools. 

The final phase of the transition would come in August 2025, when the approved schools would begin their first year as charter schools. If all three schools were approved, they would be jointly led by a governing board—the Newberry City Commission for 1-4 years, then a governing board specifically for the schools. 

Since NEF announced the coming vote on Monday, the community has been abuzz with questions and opinions on the campaign. 

Some Archer citizens complained that their town had not been informed ahead of time and accused NEF of trying to push the smaller town out of the schools. Searby said in the meeting that the organization has received even more complaints from Newberry parents and NEF is not trying to push Archer out.  

Searby apologized for the secrecy but explained that NEF was trying to get as much information ready as possible before announcing its intentions. 

“We’ve been criticized for both, ‘why didn’t you tell us sooner?’ and ‘why don’t you have more information now?” Searby said. “Both of which put us in a quandary. So we had to make a very difficult decision, asking ourselves when should we release this publicly, and how should that look?” 

On Friday, Alachua County Public Schools (ACPS) announced a new information page on its website with a parent fact sheet and employee FAQ. 

Several points on the ACPS site emphasize the extra costs the district covers above what state funding provides for things like busing, ESE and extra-curricular activities. 

NEF has promised in the FAQs on its own website the continuation of operations as usual at the Newberry schools, and Searby pointed out that most of these things are required by the state, at least to some level. For some things where the district is able to share resources between its own schools, Searby said the Newberry schools would want to keep an option open to possibly collaborate with ACPS. 

“We want a positive relationship with the school board,” Searby said. 

If the schools converted, the facilities themselves would remain the property of ACPS, but all maintenance and improvement would fall to the charter schools. 

Searby said NEF expects to save some money on maintenance expenses through a partnership with the city of Newberry. He said Newberry would also likely fix issues such as broken air conditioning and sinks in a more timely manner than ACPS, and that the charters could more easily transform community donations into positive effects in the schools. 

Some participants raised concerns about the teachers’ ability to unionize if they were working for a charter. ACPS employee contracts are negotiated between the district and the Alachua County Education Association (ACEA), which this year brought a 3.5% increase in addition to the automatic step increase, which created a total increase of 4.5-5%. 

Newberry Education First has promised an immediate 3% raise for teachers, and Searby said the organization recognizes the workers’ right to unionize. Though working for a charter school would automatically withdraw teachers from the ACEA, Searby said those teachers could form their own union or ask to rejoin the existing union. 

Michelle George, one of the parents who lined up to ask a question at the meeting, paused first to say that though she has not made up her mind about the charter schools, she appreciates NEF listening and asking questions. She said she feels the SBAC has set Newberry low on its list of priorities, and that change is slow coming through that avenue. 

“But if we’ve gotta worry about the east side, we have rural kids on the west side,” George said. “They always think that everybody out here is rich. Your kids are fine. I assure you they are not caring about the rural children in Archer.” 

Searby told the group that part of the goal in creating charter schools is to get political agendas out of education. He said NEF is made up of people of diverse backgrounds with opinions across the political spectrum, who only want to improve their children’s education. 

“It’s important that you understand that this is a group of people that is not here for a political agenda,” Searby said. “We are here for our kids. And the school board is spending a tremendous amount of time talking about gender identity and book banning, both from the right and the left, when we have problems, we have 11 weeks where we can’t get an AC fixed.” 

A video recording of the whole meeting can be found on the NEF website. The group has also organized a town hall meeting in Archer on Feb. 29 and two more town hall meetings in Newberry on March 6 and 26.