FORT PIERCE - A charter school company has withdrawn its application to open a school in the Tradition community of Port St. Lucie.

“In these very tenuous economic times we feel that it be best that we withdraw the application,” Rod Sasse, director of Imagine Schools, wrote in a letter to the St. Lucie County School Board.

Imagine International Academy at Tradition, as the school was tentatively called, would have enrolled kindergarten to eighth grade students. It also would have drawn much of its student population from the children of employees at a biotechnology research park, the Florida Center for Innovation at Tradition.

Charter schools are paid for with public money, but run privately.

Imagine still plans to open The Nau School for kindergarten through eighth grade students in southwestern Port St. Lucie near Becker Road, school officials said. The charter school has about 325 students enrolled so far, said Kathy McGinn, the district’s assistant superintendent for strategic planning and central services. It is slated to open next year.

The Nau School asked last year for an extended deadline for students to enroll after construction was delayed and several temporary locations fell through. The school, which had 700 students pre-registered last year, didn’t open as planned.

Imagine can submit another application to open the Tradition school, officials said, but the process would start over.

Tags: Schools, St. Lucie County, Tradition

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Economy, Fort Pierce, Port St. Lucie, Schools, St. Lucie County, Tradition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.