The D.C. Public Charter School Board has voted tonight to convert seven Catholic schools to charters. The vote was unanimous, after about 15 minutes of discussion. More to come.

UPDATE, 10 P.M.: The Catholic conversions, to be known as the Center City Public Charter School, were the only application to be accepted unconditionally by the board this year. The application for the National Collegiate Preparatory Academy, a high school, was also approved unanimously, albeit with conditions to be specified. The board denied the applications from the other seven schools, all but two unanimously.

While introducing the charter-applications portion of the agenda, board chair Tom Nida mentioned that letters and petitions had been received in opposition to the Center City application, but during the discussion of the proposal, virtually every member spoke in praise of it.

“These have been well-run schools with a culture of achievement and high standards,” said member Will Marshall.

Member Dora Marcus called Center City’s a “strong application” and said it was “our duty” to keep the schools open.

The only even mildly negative comments came from member Karl Jentoft, who expressed concerns (somewhat self-servingly) at higher level of oversight and accountability the schools would have as a charter, and from member and executive director Josephine Baker, who expressed some dismay at the size of the proposed school—possibly more than 1,000 students across seven campuses. Both voted to approve.

Jentoft dismissed much of the hullabaloo surrounding the decision: “There’s been a lot of political stuff going on,” he said, “but our role is to look at the application and make sure the children get an education.”

Nida closed discussion after about 15 minutes with a defense of the board’s procedures. “We’re in a situation where I come back to our process,” he said. “The process has been followed….Has it been followed? Is it fair to the parties concerned? This is a test of our process.”

He included a poke at the old D.C. Board of Education, which used to share chartering authority with the Public Charter School Board before giving up that authority in 2006 with the achievement of its schools in doubt: “This is why we’re the sole authorizer. Our process has worked.”

As LL first reported, city legislators are gearing up to put additional restrictions on the expansion and oversight of the city’s charter schools. Yesterday, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray, along with Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells and Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr., introduced legislation toward those ends.

Well, charter backers are wasting no time fighting back.

The city’s main pro-charter group, Friends of Choice in Urban Schools (FOCUS), is planning a Wilson Building press conference tomorrow morning, to be followed by a door-to-door lobbying tour of the hallways, where politicos will be given copies of a pro-charter petition signed by 5,700 charter supporters. The petition, according to a press release, “asks the mayor and Council to continue to let the parents decide how many charter schools are open in D.C.”

A meeting was scheduled this afternoon in the office of Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, but it was rescheduled due to scheduling conflicts.

In an e-mail circulated to charter parents asking them to attend, a FOCUS employee explained that, “We just want you to tell your story and why you chose your charter school….It’s an election year and we want the DC Council members (especially those that are anti-charter) to know that they have to answer to parents who choose to send their kids to charter schools.”

Press release after jump.

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Minutes ago, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray introduced a bill containing several changes to charter school oversight, the School Reform Amendment Act of 2008—as LL reported in his column last week.

The legislation, as described in comments by Gray and co-sponsors Tommy Wells of Ward 6 and Harry Thomas Jr. of Ward 5, contains several components. The first is to change the process by which members of the Public Charter School Board are nominated; currently the mayor selects nominees from a list provided by the federal education department. The bill proposes making the members direct mayoral appointees with a District residency requirement, a move likely to attract congressional scrutiny.

Other parts:

• A requirement to match quarterly payments to charters to enrollment figures, making sure money better follows the movement of students between schools
• A required 15-month planning period for new charter schools. Virtually every charter school has followed this to date; the grand exception, of course, is the pending Center City application, which would convert seven Catholic schools to charters in only three months.
• A requirement to open only a single campus upon a school’s initial chartering (also a poke at the parochial schools), and, as a corollary to that, a requirement that a charter school meet certain academic benchmarks before expanding.

In his remarks, Wells made the point that charters schools were intended to be places of “innovation and best practices” in educational methods. “Failure to make adequate yearly process in five years is not a best practice,” he said.

Members Marion Barry of Ward 8, Mary Cheh of Ward 3, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, plus at-large members Kwame R. Brown and David A. Catania, signed on as co-sponsors, giving the bill immediate majority support.