In November the NUSD Board of Trustees UNANIMOUSLY denied the Healy Charter Petition.

The reasons cited by the NUSD Staff and Legal Team were many:

• Unrealistic enrollment estimates with Ms. Healy stating she would enroll 40 TK children each year while NUSD schools enroll approximately 24 TK students each annually.
• Unrealistic economic projections in which Ms. Healy included speculative grant monies in her budget estimations. Grant monies can’t be counted on in creating a budget as one never knows if a grant will be awarded or not
• Unrealistic plans to enroll a large amount of low-income, foster and homeless youth with a compensatory increase in State funding for these children without ANY meaningful outreach to these student groups
• An unvetted, untested in the classroom curriculum
• NO community support.

Let’s delve into the last item a bit.  It appears that Ms. Healy is a recent transplant to Novato having moved here when NUSD was potentially planning on closing an elementary school due to budgetary constraints in 2021.

This traumatic scenario, which thankfully never came to pass, caused significant PTSD amongst the families at the targeted schools and made frequent headlines in the Marin IJ as well as on local TV news.

Could it be that Ms. Healy moved to Novato to take advantage of a newly vacated elementary school in 2021 to start her Charter school?

While one can never be sure, suffice it to say that Ms. Healy has had NO supporters at either public meeting held at NUSD for her Charter petition and it does not appear from her public comments that she has any awareness of the community she decided to move to in order to plunk an ill-conceived and unwanted Charter school in, denying in an interview to an IJ reporter last Fall that NUSD has had any budgetary issues.

IN the meantime Ms. Healy, undeterred in her attempt to start an unwanted Charter school in Novato has APPEALED the NUSD denial of her petition to the Marin County Board of Education.

The Marin County Board of Ed will hold a public hearing on this appeal on February 14^th at 3:30PM at the County Board of Ed offices 1111 Las Gallinas Ave, Terra Linda.

See you all there!