[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/TheGreen_09122014_MoyerClose.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media's Tom Byrne and contributor Larry Nagengast discuss Moyer's efforts to avoid closure.]
For the third time in three years, Delaware education officials are poised to close a charter school largely because of poor academic performance.
But leaders of the Maurice J. Moyer Academic Institute are clinging to a glimmer of hope that they will avoid the same fate as the Pencader Business & Finance Charter High School and the Reach Academy for Girls when the State Board of Education holds its monthly meeting on Sept. 18.
At the meeting, Secretary of Education Mark Murphy will announce his decision, based on the Sept. 5 report of the Charter School Accountability Committee, which recommended that the school be closed at the end of the 2014-15 school year. Murphy could decide to take no action, put the school on probation, revoke its charter or take other intermediate steps, a Department spokesman said. The state board may assent to or reject Murphy’s recommendation, but cannot modify it.
Asked what it would take for Moyer to survive, Keenan Dorsey, the first-year head of the middle and high school in northeast Wilmington, answered simply: “It’s called prayer, that’s what it’s called.”
But Dorsey remains hopeful, in part because Department of Education officials have seen some signs of improvement at Moyer in the early days of the new school year. Also, he questions whether it would be wise to vote now to close a school nine months later, thus taking away any motivation for staff and students to continue to improve.
“I’m hoping for the opportunity to wait until the end of the school year and base the decision on what is happening now,” says Dorsey, a Wilmington native and self-described “cleanup guy” who worked for 11 years in the Brandywine School District before spending the last three as principal of the Red Lion Christian Academy in Bear.
Moyer shares some parallels with Pencader and Reach, but there are differences as well.
Pencader, closed in the spring of 2013, was plagued by poor administration and weak academic achievement. A new team of administrators was hired in late 2012 but state education officials deemed their efforts too little, too late.
Reach also suffered from administrative and academic woes and the Murphy decided last November to revoke its charter as of the end of the 2013-14 school year. Reach remained open, however, after the school filed suit against the Department of Education, claiming the revocation of the charter of the state’s sole girls-only charter school violated its students’ legal rights. Both sides agreed in April to have the suit dismissed, with the state agreeing to let Reach continue to operate and not challenge its right to seek another charter renewal review at the end of this school year.
Moyer has had its share of problems. It predecessor, the Maurice J. Moyer Academy, which operated under different management, had its charter revoked in 2010. A year later, the state granted a charter to the New Moyer Academy, to begin operations in the 2012-13 school year. In that first year, students at the New Moyer scored better in the state testing program than students at the defunct Moyer had done the year before. However, in 2013-14, Moyer’s scores were the lowest of any charter school in the state.
In July, the school changed its name, and it now is operating as the Maurice J. Moyer Academic Institute. It currently enrolls about 225 students in grades 6-12.
In its Sept. 5 report, the Charter School Accountability Committee found Moyer out of compliance with its charter not only for its academic performance, but for services provided to students with special education needs, its curriculum and its handling of disciplinary cases.
Nevertheless, Moyer officials hope the state will give them one more chance.
Other charter schools that serve low-income populations in Wilmington, including Kuumba Academy, East Side Charter and Prestige Academy, struggled at the start but righted themselves and are now considered successful. “None of these schools would have been able to become successful if they had not been given time,” Dorsey says. “All I’m asking for is a probationary year to prove that [Moyer] is equipped to service all of our students.”
At a public hearing Wednesday night in Wilmington, several speakers urged the state to give Moyer more time to demonstrate its ability to provide its students with a good education, and Richard Smith, president of the Delaware State Conference of the NAACP, said the civil rights organization would sue the state if it revoked Moyer’s charter. Moyer's student body is 88 percent African-American; 78 percent are from low-income families and 31 percent have special education needs.
Wilmington resident Waynna Dobson, who lives near the school, said the school should remain open because it has become a safe haven for youths. “There’s teachers there that understand them and care about them as well as the staff as well as the board of directors,” she said.
Moyer will have one more opportunity to make its case before the next week’s State Board of Education meeting. It has until Monday to make its final response to the Accountability Committee’s report.
However, if history is any guide, these pleas will have little impact. Students and supporters of Pencader and Reach rallied at public hearings, and leaders of those schools used their final responses to promise more improvements, but both had their charters revoked.
Dorsey says that Moyer’s final response will likely reinforce the points the school has tried to make during the Charter School Accountability Committee hearings and note some of the changes that have occurred in the first weeks of the school year.
For example, although the state hasn’t given final approval to Moyer’s entire curriculum, the school has changed its instructional model from one that relied on a package of online classes for core subjects to direct classroom instruction in language arts, math, social studies and science. Electives are still offered through an online package.
This change was needed, Dorsey says, because many students are performing far below grade level when they enroll at Moyer and do not have access to computers at home. These two factors, he explains, make it difficult for students to master online learning.
The class schedule has been changed, from 48-minute periods to 90-minute blocks for core subjects.
Discipline problems have been minimal at the start of the school year, he says.
Monick Foote, Moyer’s dean of students, said no students had been suspended during the first two weeks of class, compared with eight during the same period last year.
“Our administration and school board are working collaboratively, and they’re giving full support to staff,” Foote says. “It has really helped the environment, and our scholars are responding.”
It will take some time to demonstrate that the changes now taking place at Moyer can result in sustained improvement, Dorsey says.
He sees little merit in the Accountability Committee’s recommendation that a decision be made now on revoking the school’s charter.
“Our students have bought into the new vision of the school,” he says. Deciding now that it should be closed “would be counterproductive and detrimental to the mindsets of our students.”
If Moyer’s charter is revoked next week and the school remains open, Dorsey fears that both students and staff could lose their motivation to succeed, that they’ll wonder whether the year matters at all. A pending closure could also prompt staff members to seek other employment, threatening the school’s newfound stability.
Asked about these concerns, a Department of Education spokeswoman responded: “DOE would be closely monitoring the school to ensure it has financial and operational viability through the end of the school year.”
Many Moyer students are performing well below grade level when they enroll. Proficiency tests administered last week showed that many students are working at kindergarten through fourth-grade levels, well below the grades 6-12 level curriculum that the school offers, Dorsey says.
For many of these students, it will take two years for them to advance to work at the proper grade level, he says. But, if the school is ordered to close, “these students will be forced to return to the system that failed them originally.”
Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, an organization that promotes the charter school movement and supports its schools, says “there is no easy answer” in deciding Moyer’s fate and when to make that decision.
While making the decision now could pose problems for the school, a closure decision would give Moyer students the ability to participate in the public school system’s choice enrollment program when that window opens rather than being forced into their home district’s feeder pattern based on their residence, Massett says.
“We have to trust in the process,” she adds.
“Last year, we were mixed up, nobody here really knew what was going on,” says Bebe Coker, the longtime Wilmington education activist who serves as vice chairman of Moyer’s board of directors.
Now the school has a new leadership team “and we’re ready to roll,” she says. “We hope and pray we’re given the opportunity to show what these kids can do.”