“Every school has to do something to improve,” Kendall Massett says, but the executive director of the Delaware Charter School Network is pleased that the State Board of Education last month renewed the charters of all six schools up for review this academic year.
Five of the schools faced few hurdles in their renewal requests, but the Great Oaks Charter School, plagued by issues with enrollment, attendance and academic performance over the past two years, had multiple challenges to overcome.
State Secretary of Education Mark Holodick, following the recommendations of the Department of Education’s Charter School Accountability Committee, attached 16 conditions to Great Oaks’ renewal.
“Turnaround work is hard,” Massett said but, after being placed on formal review, a form of probation, in December 2022, Great Oaks has improved its academics, decreased chronic absenteeism and strengthened its culture and overall environment.
The conditions listed in Holodick’s renewal letter include: regular meetings with Department of Education staff to discuss progress in meeting the conditions; submitting monthly progress reports on school finances, having an enrollment of at least 119 students on April 1 and 148 students on September 30 (current enrollment is 145); and meeting a February 1 deadline for submitting an array of plans covering, among other things, curriculum standards, leadership succession and special education programming, staffing and parental outreach.
The Great Oaks saga
Great Oaks opened in Wilmington in 2015, along with Freire Charter School, at a time when the state was looking to strengthen its charter roster by bringing in operators who had demonstrated success in other states. Great Oaks fit that description, having launched successful programs in urban areas in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Great Oaks, offering instruction for middle and high school students, also seemed like an ideal fit for Wilmington’s Community Education Building, then envisioned as the home for four charters serving the entire K-12 spectrum.
But the original plan went unfulfilled. While Great Oaks hired some managers who had Delaware connections, most of the big decisions were made from Great Oaks headquarters in New York City.
“Folks who weren’t in the community were planning a school in Wilmington. Delaware is a state in and of itself, and the organizers were folks who weren’t in the state,” said LaRetha Odumosu, who took over as Great Oaks’ executive director in late 2022 while continuing to serve as head of the middle school at the Charter School of New Castle.
Odumosu joined Great Oaks as it worked through the formal review, which could have resulted in the school’s closure. While the school did not meet all the conditions imposed in the formal review, it made enough progress to prevent the revocation of its charter.
For this cycle, she said, the renewal process wasn’t nearly as difficult. “Last year, there were 22 conditions [set by the state] and we were an entirely new team. This year, I don’t think there’s [any condition] that we won’t be able to meet.”
After a promising start in Delaware, Great Oaks struggled to meet its enrollment goals. When it opened in 2015, Great Oaks’ leaders projected an enrollment of 200 in sixth grade in its first year and 100 students in each of grades 6-12 when it completely built out its programming. In Great Oaks’ fifth year, enrollment reached 479 students in grades 6-10. Then the COVID-10 pandemic hit and enrollment dropped by one-third, to 319 students in the 2020-21 school year. By then, Great Oaks’ management recognized that students living in Wilmington had many school options through eighth grade but fewer choices for high school. Great Oaks requested a charter modification to transition to a high school-only operation by the 2023-24 school year, with an authorized enrollment of 325 students.
Nevertheless, and partly because of the phase-out of the middle school, enrollments continued to tumble, to 285 in 2021-22, 217 in 2022-2023 and 145 for the current school year.
Great Oaks enrolls significant numbers of students with special needs. Odumosu describes 15 percent of the student body as “justice impacted,” having had contact with police or the juvenile justice system, and another 10 percent as teen mothers or mothers-to-be. Enrollment data submitted with its renewal application showed that 36 percent of its students have special education needs, 7 percent are English learners and 74 percent are from low-income families.
“The school serves a need, [enrolling] severely impacted students, those who need a smaller environment so they don’t fall through the cracks,” Massett said.
Working through its travails, Great Oaks has now “right-sized” its enrollment with a target of 148 students in grades 9-12, Odumosu says.
“Changing the narrative” in the next step, she says. “Great Oaks has been in the news for a year and a half and the information hasn’t been great. But we’ve been renewed, we’re a high school only, and many people haven’t heard of our school.”
The school’s future success in sustaining and increasing enrollment will depend significantly on its current student body. Recruiting, she says, “is a lot of word of mouth, our kids telling their friends, ‘here’s why I love this school.’”
Moving forward, she said, a key priority will be “getting aligned with the Department of Education and keeping the lines of communication open.”
Other charters renewed
At its December 14 meeting, the State Board of Education spent less than 15 minutes voting to accept Holodick’s recommendations to renew the charters of Great Oaks and five other schools. The renewals, all for five years, take effect on July 1.
Positive Outcomes in Dover, which beat the Charter School of Wilmington by one day in 1995 for the distinction of being the first charter to open in the state, now enrolls 122 students in grades 7-12, primarily serving youths who might not thrive in a larger setting, Massett said. The school’s strengths, she said, include retaining teachers at a time when many schools are experiencing high staff turnover and burnout and sharing back-office services to support other charter schools.
Kuumba Academy, in Wilmington’s Community Education Building, has shown consistency in its enrollments – roughly 90 percent of its authorized 700 students, with about 85 percent of its student body returning for the following year. The student body in the K-8 school is 90 percent African American, with more than 55 percent from low-income families and 14 percent in special education programs. “They’re thinking about the whole child, and they use art to help children learn more about themselves,” Massett said.
Freire Charter School, which opened in Wilmington in 2015 serving grades 8-12, has consistently enrolled between 450 and 500 students. More than 80 percent of its student body is African American; about half are from low-income families and one-quarter require special education services.
First State Military Academy in Clayton enrolls about 450 students, and retains about 80 percent of its student body from year to year. Its prime attractions are a Marine Corps Junior ROTC program and a curriculum that emphasizes project-based learning.
Sussex Montessori, which opened in Seaford in 2020 with 260 students in kindergarten through third grade, has added a grade a year and now enrolls 439 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. Its school population is roughly 50 percent minority and 10 percent Hispanic, and school leaders say they aim for an enrollment that includes more than half its students from low-income families.
The outlook
Delaware currently has 23 charter schools, with the Bryan Allen Stevenson School of Excellence scheduled to open in Georgetown in the fall. It would serve grades 6-8 in its first year and gradually expand to serve both middle and high school grades.
Five charters are up for renewal next fall: Charter School of New Castle, EastSide Charter in Wilmington, Gateway and Odyssey in suburban Wilmington and Las Americas Aspira Academy in Newark.
In the new year Massett said, charter school leaders will meet with curriculum specialists at the Department of Education to ensure that subject area content at all schools align with state standards, a shortcoming that was pointed out for several schools in the recent renewal cycle.
Massett also said she hopes Delaware legislators consider acting on some of the recommendations related to charter schools in the report on the state’s school funding system issued last month by the American Institutes of Research.
Recommendations that all schools in the state have greater flexibility in how they spend state funds, she said, show support for one of the primary tenets of the charter school movement – that freeing charters from some of the regulations traditional schools must follow can lead to more effective and efficient operations.
More importantly, she said, the AIR report recommended simplifying the formula that is now used to determine how much money a school district must send to a charter school for each of the district’s students that it enrolls.
The report summarizes the push-and-pull between districts and charters over calculations within the formula.
The report states: “The local cost per pupil for charters varies according to the sending district as some districts spend more from local revenue than others…. Charter school leaders … feel that districts are able to “game the system” by categorizing spending so that it is excluded from the local cost calculations for charter schools. Districts, in contrast, feel that if they are raising revenue for a specific purpose … they should be able to use it for that purpose without it affecting their payments to charter schools.”
In part because of confusion over these calculations, the amount forwarded to charters can increase or decrease on a year-to-year basis and the payment varies from district to district, making it hard for charters to plan consistently for future years.
As one example, Massett cited the Sussex Academy, a middle and high school program in Georgetown that enrolls students from nine school districts. “Each one of those districts has a different local share” that is forwarded to Sussex Academy, she said.
“That’s our big pie in the sky,” Massett said, “equal funding for charters from all districts.”
