TUSD joins forces with Yaquis to reopen Richey as charter school

The new school, which has been dubbed Richey Charter School, would serve grades K-8. The population will primarily consist of children living in the district.

The school, near North Oracle and West Grant roads, is expected to open for the 2013-2014 school year.

Richey was closed in 2010 as a cost-saving measure, but the move was not supported by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe because the school primarily catered to tribe families.

At the time, the board said it was not financially viable to keep a school with an enrollment of about 90 students open.

Since then, Tucson Unified School District has leased a portion of the building to the Pascua Yaqui Tribe for a community center for health, wellness, adult education and recreational functions.

The charter school will be sponsored by TUSD but was developed in conjunction with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe. The tribe will share the cost of maintaining the school.

TUSD board member Miguel Cuevas has advocated for TUSD to open a charter school. He said the partnership with the Pascua Yaquis makes the school that much stronger.

"This is an absolutely wonderful opportunity," Cuevas said. "We need to clearly define that anyone can open up a charter school, but the question is can they do it well? TUSD can do it very well and we plan to use this opportunity to provide a pilot school that offers excellent academic programs with high student achievement as the focus."

Unlike the closed Richey Elementary, Cuevas believes the charter school can be successful for various reasons, including cost-sharing with the tribe and getting additional revenue incentives from the state.

The charter school will have its own separate revenue stream so as to not affect the regular K-12 noncharter budget of TUSD, said Maria Menconi, the district's interim deputy superintendent.

The charter also will receive more in per-pupil funding - a difference of more than $1,000 per child from the state, said Yousef Awwad, TUSD's chief financial officer.

Another way in which the charter school will be different from TUSD's typical schools is that it can use certified and noncertified teachers.

For TUSD, the incentive to open a charter school is less about money than it is about building relationships, Menconi said.

"After Richey closed, we experienced a real sadness from the Pascua Yaqui community," Menconi said. "This is an opportunity to build relationships and at the same time offer a school that is different and might be attractive to other students."

The capacity of the charter school will be about 200, but the number of students to be served in the initial year is expected to be half of that.

The academic curriculum will be challenging and will include math, language arts, social studies, science, fine arts and Yaqui-language instruction.

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TUSD gets its metal detector

Those attending TUSD Governing Board meetings will now have to walk through a full-body metal detector.

The security tool was revealed Tuesday night - a week after protesters took over a meeting and deployed a smoke bomb.

Jeff Coleman, TUSD's director of school safety, said the $2,800 metal detector was ordered more than a month ago.

Coleman called it a "more effective method of searching people overall" than the metal-detector wands in use for the last year.

"When you go into a public meeting where they are screening people, this is what they have at the courthouse or at the Board of Supervisors," Coleman said.

The equipment also will be used for other special district events, he said.

TUSD is working with Tucson police to identify the person responsible for the smoke bomb in the Governing Board room. The investigation is ongoing, Coleman said.

Contact reporter Alexis Huicochea at ahuicochea@azstarnet.com or 573-4175.