CUMBERLAND — The 2009 state budget approved by the General Assembly includes a plan for a “mayoral academy,” a new regional charter school serving Blackstone Valley communities that Mayor Daniel J. McKee has spent the greater part of the year campaigning for.

But the budget makes no commitment that the state will pay for the academy. For that to happen, McKee says he and a team of local advocates need to secure the money that they promised the General Assembly was out there.

“We built our case to the General Assembly that we could raise money,” McKee said yesterday. “We have said publicly that there is interest. Now we need to show evidence of that.”

The coming months will determine how close McKee gets to the September 2009 target for opening the school.

McKee expects to meet with local officials who have been working closely with the project since it was first announced in December. They will likely form an acting board of directors for the mayoral academy.

Those involved include the members of a coalition of suburban and urban mayors and town administrators; town Director of Children, Youth, and Learning Michael Magee; Progreso Latino CEO Ramon Martinez; and two education policy experts, Bryan Hassel, of Public Impact in North Carolina, and Martin R. West, a professor at Brown University.

The acting board will seek financial commitments from national foundations to underwrite the start-up costs of the school, including the rental or purchase of a facility, furniture, equipment and supplies.

While there have been no commitments yet, McKee says he has been in “constant contact” with a number of grant-writing foundations, among them the Broad Foundation, in Los Angeles.; Nellie Mae, in Braintree, Mass.; and people locally connected to the Bill and Melinda Gates and Walton Family foundations, he said.

McKee talks of developing a “marketing strategy” that will “maximize the brand name of mayoral academies” and attract donors. “We need to show to the foundations that the kids in Rhode Island are just as valuable as kids in other areas of the country” where they are already committing money, he said.

The board will also take applications from nonprofit organizations and ultimately select one to run the school, which current plans see as a 150- to 200-student school in the Valley Falls section of town.

McKee says he has met with a number of nonprofit groups that run charter schools elsewhere, among them the Knowledge Is Power Program, Achievement First and Democracy Prep Charter School.

These nonprofit groups, he says, have been successful in establishing their names nationally, but have never come to Rhode Island because of restrictions in the state’s current charter school legislation.

But mayoral academies, as approved by the General Assembly, are making those organizations take another look at Rhode Island. The academies would be unique under state law because their teachers would not be part of the state pension system and their salaries would not be subject to agreements between public school districts and teachers’ unions.

It is a cost-saving step that McKee believes is crucial to the new school’s flexibility and the state’s educational future. “This is a huge step,” he said. “This changes policy in Rhode Island and allows for innovation in education that is currently not allowed.”

When enough financing is secured and a school manager is chosen, the academy’s board of directors must submit a charter school application to the state Department of Education Board of Regents.

The board will look at, among many other things, the performance standards that the school will be based upon, as well as its operational structure and estimated costs, said McKee. The goal is to have an application submitted by December.

If approved, the school’s charter would then go to the General Assembly, which would decide whether to commit state money to the proposal.

And there are other hurdles if the mayoral academy project makes it that far: a moratorium on new charter schools is likely to expire this summer, but there are a number of charter school applications pending that will likely get priority over a mayoral academy.

Says McKee: “It was hard to get General Assembly approval in the budget. It will be equally challenging to get to the next level.”

pmarcelo@projo.com