Last night, a school board in Oregon turned down a charter school application because the proposed charter would compete with the district:

Board members said the 6-12th grade school, sponsored by Corbett School District superintendent Bob Dunton, was an innovative program but would compete with course offerings at the high school and represented a budget risk for the financially-strapped school district. [...]

Though no board members specifically cited one of the state mandated reasons for denying a charter applications, after the meeting board members said the school represented an “identifiable adverse impact” on the school district because the district might lose students to the charter and therefore a portion of state funding.

When school boards can stop charters simply because they want to keep their monopoly, no charter is safe.