The Fayette County Board of Education recently approved applying for a $5,000 planning grant to determine if the system has enough funds to establish the county’s first charter school in 2007 — a special school that would focus on drop-out prevention.

The county first started on a charter school petition in 2001, but has dramatically scaled back its approach in the last six years.

The system’s original vision was for a comprehensive technical high school, such as the Central Education Center in Newnan, said Ed Steil, who is the school system’s director of the LaFayette Educational Center.

The center is the old Fayette County High School and serves hundreds of students each year with a variety of high school and college courses. But as the school system looked at creating a comprehensive high school, they ran into one giant roadblock: money.

“We’ve scaled it back to something we can afford,” Steil said.

This year, at LaFayette, Steil said the system served more than 110 at-risk students in various capacities. The charter school would allow the system to concentrate full-time on 75 students in classes of 15 students.

“It’s a growing problem that we’ve become aware of and want to offer people another option instead of going through the GED program,” Steil said.

In 1998, the General Assembly created the Charter Schools Act, which allows schools to be created that are performance-oriented and offer more flexibility than public schools. The first charter school law was passed in 1993, but the legislators updated the process in 1998.

In the concept paper on the charter school, Steil said he “envisions the development of a non-traditional public charter high school which will employ unique educational programs to allow high school students who are not on track to graduate an opportunity to gain course credit not earned at another Fayette County high school.”

The paper also said the major benefit of the school would be an increased graduation rate for students who drop-out.

Steil also provided an example of how the new school would operate.

“When a student takes Algebra 1A in the LaFayette School, five study components of this course would be required for completion and to earn course credit. The student would take a pretest for each of the separate components and may show mastery of one or more of the components. The student would receive credit for that mastery, but for those components the student did not demonstrate mastery, that student would be required to complete the full instructional portion of that component.”

Only when the student has mastered all the components would he receive credit for the course.

In Georgia, charter schools have had an up and down road. Steil said an elementary charter school recently closed in Clayton County. One of the biggest successes, though, in the entire state is the CEC in Newnan.

In 2000, the Coweta County School System partnered with local businesses and West Central Technical College to open one of the first charter schools on the southside. According to the school’s Web site, it was named a model school in 2004 by a group of professional education organizations.

More than 400 organizations from numerous states and 15 countries have visited the school since it opened. Central Education models its curriculum around the needs of the business community and is constantly in communication with business leaders to help modify the curriculum to help provide workers for Coweta’s businesses. The school has aided the county’s dropout rate, which has fallen from 8.6 percent to 5 percent.

While Fayette’s first effort at a charter school won’t be quite that ambitious, Steil believes it will help address a problem.

“This is a situation that is perfect for an alternative form of learning,” he said.