Franklin Towne Charter High School is now challenging Pennsylvania’s charter school law

A charter school has raised a new issue with its case against the Philadelphia School District, challenging as unconstitutional the portion of Pennsylvania law under which the board seeks to revoke its charter.

The move comes after the school board began charter revocation proceedings against Franklin Towne Charter High School over allegations of lottery manipulation that shut out students from certain zip codes and schools.

Franklin Towne, a high-performing charter in Northeast Philadelphia that educates 1,300 students, sued the Philadelphia School District in October, asking a judge to force the school system to replace the hearing officer assigned to hear the nonrenewal case.

Pointing to a report issued this fall examining allegations of racial bias in Philadelphia charter authorization and closure, Franklin Towne’s lawyers said the hearing officer, Rudy Garcia, should be disqualified. Garcia is an independent hearing officer but has run most of the district’s revocation and nonrenewal proceedings, issuing findings and recommendations on whether the school board should vote to close a charter.

Although the report found that the district, which authorizes and decides the fate of Philadelphia’s charters, engaged in no overt bias, the report recommended that the school board stop using Garcia for most hearings “as this practice has created the appearance of an improper bias toward the Board of Education and has resulted in a lack of trust in the system from the charter school sector.”

Now, in addition to that challenge, lawyers for Franklin Towne say that while the district is within its rights under Pennsylvania law to revoke a school’s charter, the law “expressly permits the unconstitutional commingling of prosecutorial and adjudicative functions” of the district in the revocation process, “in violation of fundamental due protections afforded by both the Federal and Pennsylvania State Constitutions.”

Translated, that means it’s objecting to Garcia serving both as both a neutral arbiter and the person who essentially decides the charter school’s fate.

A judge will consider the emergency injunction motion at a hearing scheduled for Jan. 26.

Franklin Towne continues to operate, as all schools do during the revocation process; if the school’s charter is revoked, it would have to close, but that seems unlikely, given the school’s academic performance.

But the revocation process and the hearing it triggers will make Franklin Towne publicly account for what happened with its lottery.

School board members, when they voted to begin revocation proceedings, called out the school’s “blatant racist practices that they have been on alert for for quite some time, and just chose to ignore” and said the alleged rigging was “analogous to cheating, and it’s illegal.”

District and board officials have called out Franklin Towne for its demographics not reflecting the city’s. The school enrolls a higher-than-expected percentage of white students.

A top Franklin Towne official told The Inquirer that former Franklin Towne chief executive Joseph Venditti fixed the lottery to keep out students from certain zip codes — most of which are majority-Black — and schools and siblings of some students with academic and behavioral challenges. Venditti has since left the school.

The whistleblower, Patrick Field, has sued Franklin Towne for retaliating against him. Field was put on administrative leave from his position as chief academic officer five days after The Inquirer story about his allegations was published.