HALSEY - The Central Linn School District is seeking a state grant to explore creating a business-based charter high school.

That worries some former district officials, who say Central Linn's two-year venture into business education nearly a decade ago drained money from other programs and cost too much to be maintained.

"It was a failure before, effectively. Why reinvent the wheel with the same people without oversight?" former board member Tim VanLeeuwen said.

But Superintendent Ed Curtis cautions that first, the district is a long way from making any decisions on a new school, and second, neither the school's funding nor structure will be the same as his last program, Cobra Student Enterprises.

Also, he said, Cobra's critics misunderstood its real purpose. It was a meant to provide alternative education through direct work experience. And while it was running, he said, it did just that.

"It was life-changing for a lot of kids," he said.

Central Linn High School currently has no business classes. That concerns Curtis, who believes financial skills are a critical part of a high school education.

A September workshop through the Oregon Department of Education prompted him to suggest that Central Linn explore a charter school to provide that training. Such a school, Curtis said, could complement the high school curriculum and provide more learning options.

The Central Linn School Board agreed Oct. 21 to pursue a state charter school planning grant, which could provide a maximum of $55,000.

If it is received, a committee will research what it would take to create a school, how it would operate, and whether the district would have the minimum 25 students necessary to enroll.

If the school board then agrees to move forward with the school, the district will apply for a second, larger grant to get it under way, perhaps as early as next fall.

Like Cobra Student Enterprises, the school would offer job training and real-life work experience through student-run businesses. Curtis said he hopes to attract home-schoolers and students who aren't progressing in a traditional system.

However, Curtis stressed, the idea is in the very early stages and can be pulled if the district decides it isn't a good fit.

"I don't know if any of this is feasible," he said. "It's a whole brand-new path we're looking at."

Former board members VanLeeuwen and Reed Anderson disagree. So far, they say, the plan looks a lot like Cobra. And Cobra, they insist, didn't work.

"The problem we had with Cobra Student Enterprises is we had nonbusiness people that were trying to run those businesses," said Anderson, who voted to shut the programs down in 2001. "They had to subsidize those businesses because they weren't making it on their own, of course, and they had to subsidize with budget money, which really wasn't the whole idea."

Created by Curtis in 1999, Cobra Student Enterprises gave elective credit and two-thirds minimum wage to students for running on-campus businesses such as a pizza parlor, a day care center and a bike repair shop.

The program employed a "favored few," in VanLeeuwen's opinion; about 20 students during each of its two years of operation. Some felt that was far more than actually were needed to run the few functions each business performed. All agree not enough money came in to offset the salary expenses.

"They were all a money drain," VanLeeuwen said. "I'm not opposed to running at less, but don't just throw money to give kids something to do. … At what point does it take money from the other kids?"

After Curtis' retirement in 2001, Superintendent Max Harrell recommended scrapping Cobra, saying the district could no longer afford to subsidize it in light of a state budget shortfall.

At the time, Harrell told board members Cobra had $33,000 in overruns the previous year on student salaries alone. The program had been meant to run partly on grant funds, Harrell said, but had received only about $18,000 in grants since 1999 while costing more than $200,000.

Curtis, who returned to the district after Harrell's departure in 2005 and again in 2007 after Harrell's successor also left, disputes those figures. He provided a 2001 budget document from Cobra that shows a negative balance of $32,081.

Curtis said the $200,000 comment makes no sense to him unless Harrell was talking about the entire alternative education budget, of which Cobra was a small part. But teachers and materials for that program were already part of the main budget.

The program had to be subsidized, he acknowledged. "We never expected some to become profitable, like the day care. It was a service."

Linda Hoyer, who directed Cobra at the time, remembers receiving $25,000 in district startup money and returning more than $8,000 to the district from the program's checking account when Harrell shut it down. The 2001 budget document lists both items.

More importantly, Hoyer said, she remembers at least three home-schoolers who enrolled part time at Central Linn just to be a part of Cobra. She said another 10, at least, told her the program kept them from dropping out. She published testimonials from several of those students in the program's last handbook.

Hoyer remembers the boy who broke a family cycle of poverty by using the employment skills he learned through Cobra to get a successful post-school job, and the teen mom who credited Cobra with helping her get a job to support herself and her baby.

The businesses, she said, "were a life-changing program to help kids that were struggling in school to turn their lives around, which it did."

VanLeeuwen and Anderson say the concept is good. They're just skeptical of how it would play out in a school.

"I think the programs would work better if they subsidized employers to have those kids work with businesses that are already up and running," Anderson said. "Then you're not creating competition with local businesses, and those people already have a business plan that's already working."