With its enrollments failing to meet the minimum numbers required by its contract with the state, Great Oaks Charter School, has been placed on “formal review” by the state Department of Education.
Great Oaks, touted seven years ago as a cornerstone for education resurgence in downtown Wilmington, is now in jeopardy of having its state charter revoked.
“It is a possibility” that the state could require the school to close at the end of the spring semester, Jim Mazarakis, chairman of the Great Oaks Board of Trustees, said before Tuesday’s meeting of the state’s Charter School Accountability Committee (CSAC). “We will present our case, and that is entirely within their purview.”
Great Oaks, which is transitioning from a grades 6-12 program to high school only, received the formal review notice from Secretary of Education Mark Holodick on Sept. 27. This week’s CSAC meeting initiated a process that includes two public hearings, several rounds of correspondence and another CSAC meeting before Holodick delivers his decision on the school’s status to the State Board of Education on Dec. 15.
By the numbers
Charter schools are public schools but, unlike traditional schools, they operate under a different set of standards. The charters granted them by the state include an authorized enrollment, which is based on enrollment projections made by the school during the charter approval or modification process. Schools are permitted to exceed the projection by 5 percent or fall below it by 20 percent. For Great Oaks, its authorized enrollment for this year is 325 students but its enrollment on September 30, when numbers for state funding are finalized, was 217, or just 67 percent of its authorization, and 43 students short of the 80 percent minimum.
In June 2021, as Great Oaks sought a modification of its charter to phase out middle school grades, the Department of Education said the school must enroll at least 260 students by April 2022.
Mazarakis offered several reasons for why enrollment has fallen below the authorized minimum of 260 students. About 30 students from last year’s eighth-grade class decided to go elsewhere for high school, primarily to one of the area’s vocational-technical schools. With the transition to high school only, there is no longer a seventh-grade class at Great Oaks, causing a loss of another 27 students. (This year is the last one for eighth grade at the school.)
Also, he said, the closures and remote learning required because of the COVID-19 pandemic, limited opportunities to recruit new students to enter in the fall of 2020 and 2021.
"Parents will only try us if they have a high degree of belief that we can give their child a better education than they can receive elsewhere."Jim Mazarakis, chairman of the Great Oaks Board of Trustees
Although Great Oaks recruited about 70 new students this year, that was not enough to replace last year’s 60 high school graduates and the others who chose not to return.
The downtown education scene
Great Oaks opened in Wilmington in 2015 as one of the first three tenants in the 11-story Community Education Building, the former MBNA/Bank of America office building near Rodney Square that the Longwood Foundation sought to transform into an education hub. Also moving into the building were two other charter schools, Kuumba Academy, an elementary and middle school, and Academia Antonia Alonso, a dual-language Spanish-English elementary school.
At the same time, two more charter high schools opened just a few blocks away: Freire Charter and the Delaware MET.
With another year-old charter elementary school, First State Montessori, in the building alongside Delaware MET, and room for another charter within the Community Education Building, charter school boosters envisioned perhaps 3,000 students, from kindergarten through high school, attending classes daily in the heart of downtown.
But it didn’t happen.
Delaware MET experienced serious management problems and closed after one semester. (First State Montessori eventually picked up the lease on the vacated space and added a middle school.) After one year in the Community Education Building, Academia Antonia Alonso left for greener pastures, renting space from Odyssey Charter School at its suburban Barley Mill Plaza campus west of Wilmington. (It relocated over the summer to a site near Newark.)
Great Oaks, like Freire, both offered great promise, as their operators had already opened and managed successful charters elsewhere – Freire in Philadelphia and Great Oaks in New York City and Newark, New Jersey.
In its first three years, Great Oaks made steady progress, but problems began to develop when its first students entered ninth grade, Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, told Delaware Public Media last year. Great Oaks experienced turnover in its original leadership team and top management at the Great Oaks Foundation in Manhattan was too far away to react to problems that required quick responses, Massett said.
In addition, Mazarakis said, there was a desire for the school to strengthen its Delaware ties and the management fees charged by the Great Oaks Foundation were becoming burdensome. “We didn’t think paying the foundation fees was the best way to use our limited funds,” he said.
The result was a reorganization that resulted in a Delaware-based board of trustees and an “affiliation” with the foundation which picks up certain costs, including paying for the school-based tutors that are an integral part of the Great Oaks model for serving children who are far below achievement levels in basic math and language skills.
The current alignment of charter schools in downtown Wilmington falls far short of what was envisioned seven years ago. There are only two charters (Kuumba and Great Oaks) – out of an anticipated four – in the Community Education Building, and Great Oaks’ future is in doubt, plus one high school (Friere) and one elementary-middle school (First State Montessori).
The Community Education Building is gradually repurposing itself, becoming a hub for a variety of education-related organizations. Groups like Teach For America, Teen Sharp, and the Delaware Institute for Arts in Education have offices there. The building’s kitchen, which once prepared meals for bank executives, now makes lunches that are delivered to charter schools throughout the area.
The CSAC meeting
Tuesday’s meeting, which lasted nearly three hours, covered a range of issues, including budgeting, staffing, curriculum, and poor participation and proficiency rates on the state’s annual academic assessments, as well as the obvious – enrollment and retention – and the ominous – whether the school has a closure plan prepared.
Kim Klein, the CSAC chair and an associate secretary of education, expressed serious concerns about some of Great Oaks’ operations. She said it was “very alarming” that, with all the financial issues associated with the elimination of middle school grades, the school’s Citizens Budget Oversight Committee had met only once this year. “This suggests that the board [of trustees] does not take financial concerns seriously,” she said.
At other points in the meeting, she cited the school’s repeated inability to meet its enrollment targets and described its leadership issues as “a bit of an elephant in the room.”
“This suggests that the board [of trustees] does not take financial concerns seriously."Kim Klein, the CSAC chair and an associate secretary of education
In responding to the committee’s questions, Great Oaks did not present a plan for bringing enrollment back to authorized levels. Rather, it outlined the beginnings of a leadership overhaul intended to smooth the transition to a high school. That plan includes replacing Leland Kent, the current head of school, with La Retha Odumosu, now middle school executive director at the Charter School of New Castle, and adding Edward Emmett, longtime executive director of the Positive Outcomes Charter School in Kent County, to its board of trustees.
Other management changes are in the works but could not be disclosed for two reasons: they haven’t been discussed with some of the individuals who would be affected, nor have they been approved by the school’s trustees.
Discussions on these topics will continue through written exchanges and at the second CSAC meeting on November 22.
Looking ahead
While the Department of Education has the power to revoke Great Oaks’ charter, lesser sanctions, in the form of probation or additional benchmarks for increasing enrollment, are also possible.
As the CSAC process proceeds, Great Oaks must plan for next year, because the enrollment window under the state’s school choice program runs from November through Jan. 11. “Our recruitment has gone into full swing,” Mazarakis said.
With Great Oaks becoming a 9-12 school next year, it is important that the school show that it can offer a rich curriculum that meets students’ interests and needs.
Recognizing the loss of students to vocational-technical schools this year, Great Oaks has added some vocational subjects to its course offerings. New electives this year cover fashion, real estate, and branding.
Mazarakis acknowledges that lower enrollments mean fewer teachers, which in turn means limited opportunities to offer a broad range of course offerings.
He speaks with a confidence typical of charter school leaders. “Parents will only try us if they have a high degree of belief that we can give their child a better education than they can receive elsewhere,” he said.
In the upcoming recruiting cycle, Great Oaks will rely heavily on word of mouth. “Our best supporters are our current parents,” he said.
However, with a minimum of 43 seats to fill and room for more than 100 students, the Great Oaks staff and its supportive parents have their work cut out.
“That’s going to be a challenge for us,” Mazarakis said.
