NEWPORT, Ky. – Members of a proposed Northern Kentucky charter school have filed an appeal with the Kentucky Board of Education.

Last month, the Newport School Board denied the River Cities Academy's application for a proposed school in their district.

“We were denied authorization on December 26th and we feel that authorization denial was an error,” said Lynn Schaber.

Schaber is one of the seven founding members of the River Cities Academy.

“We've developed a very strong proposal for a school and we still fundamentally believe it,” Schaber said.

After Newport School Board's decision to deny the application, the core team took the action and filed an appeal on January 23 to the Kentucky Board of Education.

“First rationale behind the appeal is that we feel that we've put together a very strong proposal and that the bias in the system didn't allow them to see the proposal,” Schaber said.

Schaber provided the appeal document.It lists bias, lack of dialogue between parties, and lack of interest among the main concerns for ground of appeal.

Schaber and her team further add by naming Superintendent Kelly Middleton and the school board for creating a team of 32 educators to review the application while omitting non-educators or parents.

In addition, seven rebuttals listed targeting cause for concerns NISD has listed in their denial which RCA is fighting as a grounds for appeal.

But Middleton says he and his team have undergone extensive training of preventing bias.

“We involved a person from all the different districts and they put a report together that's this thick with very good reasoning, and you can go online and read the report, don't take my word for it, go online and read the report,” Middleton said. “When you have this many people weighing in and we have the training for everyone and we talked about biases in that in training, I’m not sure what else we can do.”

Schaber said, “The fact that they're worried about their budget, that they're -- some of the educators aren't even informed about what river cities academy stands for and lack of engagement really makes you question whether they took us seriously.”

Middleton argues back saying the application is incomplete and has several holes for the school to launch successfully.

“So if you don't have funding, no transportation, no building yet that was given to our board where the facility would be so no to judge the building, I believe our school board would be like responsible like education malpractice to say ok you can have a school,” Middleton said.

Ultimately, the decision now lies at the hands of the Kentucky Board of Education. They have about 45 days to come back with a decision to accept or deny the appeal.