In a flurry of afternoon activity, state education officials on Thursday shut down one troubled charter school, extended a life preserver to another and hinted that major financial problems may loom at a third.
Action on requests for the renewal of charters for seven schools highlighted the agenda for the State Board of Education’s monthly meeting, and the process went smoothly for only two of them.
Secretary of Education Mark Murphy told the board he was accepting the recommendation of the Department of Education’s Charter School Accountability Committee that the Reach Academy for Girls be closed at the end of the current school year. Reach, which opened in 2010, is the sole girls-only public school in the state and serves a largely low-income population of about 380 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Murphy cited the school’s poor academic performance as the basis for his decision.
With actions on the schools being taken in alphabetical order, Murphy’s decision on Reach stunned the Rev. Canon Lloyd Casson, chairman of the school’s board of directors.
“It just stupefies me…. I can hardly speak,” he told the board.
“I think it was unjust, it was discriminatory and it demonstrated favoritism in some areas and not ours,” Casson said after the meeting. “I heard the conversations about the other schools, where they had come from , how bad they were in the beginning.”
Casson said Reach officials anticipated having their charter renewed but “we probably would have some pretty stringent conditions and if we didn’t meet those we would be placed on formal review.”
The state moved to close Reach last year, but it was kept open this year as part of the settlement of a federal lawsuit brought against the Department of Education. That agreement allowed Reach to try again for renewal this year.
Asked whether Reach had any more options available, Casson replied, “at this point, I have no idea.”
While Murphy accepted the accountability’s recommendation on closing Reach, he declined to follow its lead on the Gateway Lab School, which serves more than 200 special needs students in the elementary and middle school grades. Murphy acknowledged the committee’s finding of subpar academic performance at Gateway but said the school was being measured against a “traditional academic framework” that is not appropriate for evaluating schools with large numbers of special needs students. He recommended that Gateway’s charter be renewed for five years, provided that the school meets academic performance goals under an “alternative academic framework” by the end of the 2015-16 school year. If Gateway fails to meet those goals, Murphy said he would use the state’s formal review process for charter schools to seek Gateway’s closure.
Murphy’s decision on Gateway marked the first time in the 19-year history of charter schools in Delaware that the secretary of education had not backed a closure recommendation by the department’s staff. Murphy’s recommendation won approval from the board by a narrow 4-3 margin, with board President Teri Quinn Gray, Vice President Jorge Melendez and Patrick Heffernan dissenting.
“I’m happy they’ve given us extra time which we requested,” said Pamela Draper, the school’s treasurer and its lead founder. “We’re already showing an upward trend” in academic performance, she said.
While the Reach and Gateway cases had drawn much attention prior to the meeting, a revelation about the Family Foundations Academy, which has an elementary grades campus in New Castle and a middle school in suburban Wilmington, surprised some board members and many in the audience. Murphy announced that he could not make a recommendation on Family Foundation’s renewal request because the department had just learned of a 200-page report that contains “potentially serious allegations of financial mismanagement” at the school.
No details of the report were disclosed at the meeting, and Murphy said that the department’s charter school staff needs time to analyze the report before he can make a recommendation on renewing the school’s charter.
“I’m extremely disappointed,” Heffernan said. “We’ve got some serious management issues here that come up the day before we’re supposed to make a decision.”
Murphy said he had contacted Family Foundations’ board members and they agreed, because of the circumstances, to waive the standard deadline, which would have been Jan. 5, for action on the renewal request. Murphy did not say how long the review might take.
Board members briefly discussed possible implications of a delay in making a renewal decision for Family Foundations’ students in light of the mid-January deadline for applying to other schools under the state’s choice program.
“We’re trying to make the best of a bad situation,” Heffernan said.
Added David Blowman, deputy secretary of education and chair of the Charter School Accountability Committee, “we don’t want to in any way imply that we’re closing the school.”
Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, said after the meeting that she had heard about the Family Foundations’ report but was unaware of its contents.
For two schools, Murphy endorsed accountability committee recommendations that specific conditions be attached to their charter renewals, and the board concurred in both cases.
The Delaware Academy of Public Safety and Security was told that it must achieve a “meets standard” rating for academic performance and financial operations for the current school year. If those conditions are not met, the school would be placed on formal review next fall, a status that could ultimately lead to charter revocation.
The charter renewal for the Odyssey Charter School contains conditions associated with the school’s management. Odyssey was given a Feb. 28 deadline to bring portions of its bylaws and the composition of its Citizens Budget Oversight Committee into compliance with state law and to have its board members complete training programs provided by the Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement and the state’s Public Integrity Commission.
Two charter schools were granted five-year renewals with no strings attached: East Side Charter, which state education officials have recently trumpeted as a success story for its improved performance serving a low-income population in northeast Wilmington, and Las Americas Aspira Academy, a dual-language kindergarten through eighth grade school in Newark.