- D.C. Charter board moves to revoke charter for Community Academy [Community Academy PCS, Potomac Prep PCS, and IDEA PCS mentioned]
- D.C. Charter board allows one school to continue, begins to shut down another [Potomac Prep PCS, Community Academy PCS, and Paul PCS mentioned]
- In DC's confusing thicket of school choice, there's a guide for those who need help the most
- D.C. State Board of Education to consider early vote on new graduation requirements [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
- D.C. judge dismisses 18-year-old special education lawsuit, giving control to schools
D.C. Charter board moves to revoke charter for Community Academy [Community Academy PCS, Potomac Prep PCS, and IDEA PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
December 16, 2014
The D.C. Public Charter School Board voted unanimously Monday night to initiate the process to revoke the charter for Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School for fiscal mismanagement, after the founder was charged with diverting millions of dollars to a private management company for his own financial benefit.
A Superior Court judge in October ordered the school to stop payments to a company set up by the schools’ founder Kent Amos, because he believes the District has a strong likelihood of demonstrating in trial that the school overpaid Amos by about $1 million last year alone, in violation of District law.
A. Scott Bolden, an attorney for the school, urged the board not to take the “drastic” step and to consider the nearly 1,600 enrolled and their families who will be affected. He told the board that the judge’s ruling was a preliminary injunction that is being appealed.
“The trial is going to continue: depositions, more witnesses, more documents,” he said. “A decision for preliminary injunction is just that, preliminary.”
Charter school board president John H. “Skip” McKoy disagreed: “There is now information in the public record. We need to look at that,” he said.
“If there’s been a pattern of fiscal mismanagement, we must revoke the charter,” he said.
Board officials said they are beginning revocation proceedings now, so parents have time to enter the city’s common school enrollment lottery. The lottery opened Monday for applications and runs through March 2.
Community Academy operates three schools, named Amos 1, Amos 2, and Amos 5, serving preschool through eighth grade, as well as an online program. One school is in Ward 4, two are in Ward 5.
Amos founded the first Community Academy school as a nonprofit in 1998. In 2002, he and two colleagues founded a for-profit management company, Community Action Partners and Charter School Management, and gained approval from the schools’ board of trustees eventually to transfer some executive positions and functions to that private entity.
Over time, Judge Neal E. Kravitz said, management fees rose while costs declined, with fewer people on staff and many of the duties being performed by school employees.
At the charter board meeting Monday, charter board deputy director Naomi Rubin DeVeaux detailed some of the duplicative services that records show the school paid for.
In 2012, for example, the management company was responsible for cleaning, she said, but the school also employed a facilities manager and 20 custodians. The management company was also supposed to be responsible for food services, but the school employed a food service manager and 10 food service workers. Similar duplication of services played out in other departments.
Last year, Community Academy had its 15-year charter renewed, under the condition that it close a second academically underperforming campus. Another school was closed for poor academic performance in 2012.
In 2013, the year the charter was renewed, charter board officials said they had concerns about the management agreement. But officials said they were not able to obtain financial records from the private management company, because school officials deemed them confidential.
It was not until after the lawsuit was filed, that the board understood the management company really only employed three people, DeVeaux said.
Federal tax returns made public through the trial showed that Amos received about $1.15 million in income in 2012 from the private management company. In 2013, he received $1.38 million, including $103,000 that was paid to his wife. His stepson also earned about $167,000 that year.
Officials said at the meeting that a financial audit from 2013 raised flags of the overall financial health of the school, which had negative cash flow and was running a deficit.
They noted that the overall financial picture of the organization had improved over the past year, but improvements were made by cutting expenses to programs — to the tune of nearly $2,000 per student, while barely touching the management fee which remained over $2 million last year.
Bolden disputed the claim that the school had only three employees.
And he said that the judge already designed a remedy for what he saw as the problem, by ordering the school to terminate its management contract without further harming the schools, which he said are performing well.
But McKoy said the board’s job is straightforward — to determine whether there has been a pattern of financial mismanagement.
“Does it really make sense to pay twice for maintenance? Does it really make sense on the surface to see fees go up and the number of employees go down at the same time the budget for the programs — for the school, for the kids — is going down?” he asked.
As part of the process, the school is entitled to request an informal public hearing and present its side to the charter school board.
The charter board also voted at Monday night’s meeting to reverse course on a revocation proceedings that it started in November for Potomac Prep, which serves 435 students in preschool through eighth grade in Northeast.
The school, during its 10-year review, was found to be falling short of 19 of its 20 goals, but new leaders at the school said they were turning the school around and requested more time to let the changes take effect.
In recent weeks, charter board members and staff visited the school, and were impressed that improvements were underway.
“Nobody, including the school’s leadership, disputes that the school’s performance in the past has been poor,” said Darren Woodruff, vice-chairman of the charter board.
“However after visiting the school and hearing from the school community, many of us were persuaded that a turnaround is underway at the school. This is much more than a plan on paper; it is about continuing actual changes in culture and instruction that we have observed at the school.”
The board drafted specific conditions for the school to meet over the next three years. If it does not meet these goals each year, the school agrees to relinquish its charter at the end of the following year.
“If the school is successful in meeting the ambitious conditions set as part of the charter continuance, it will be a great outcome for the students and families at Potomac Prep,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the charter board.
He noted that on Tuesday, board members planned to visit IDEA public charter school in Northeast Washington, which faced closure in 2010, but has made significant improvements since.
“We hope we can have a similar celebration at Potomac Prep in the not too distant future.”
D.C. Charter board allows one school to continue, begins to shut down another [Potomac Prep PCS, Community Academy PCS, and Paul PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
December 17, 2014
At Monday evening's monthly meeting of the DC Public Charter School Board I witnessed something that is exceedingly rare in the history of our local movement. The board decided that it would allow a school to continue operating after it had voted to begin the revocation procedure which occurred at its November meeting. Potomac Preparatory PCS is a 10 year old charter teaching 423 students in grades Pre-Kindergarten 3 to eighth grade located in Ward 5 that scored just above the Tier 3 level on the 2014 Performance Management Framework.
Here's the background. As part of its 10 year review the PCSB determined that Potomac Preparatory had not met 17 of their goals, only partially met two goals and only fully met one. In reaction, the charter had replaced its leadership staff and changed its strategic objectives. Usually, these kinds of measures do not sway for a minute the opinions of the board.
The board then held a two and a half public hearing at the request of the school to consider the move to shutter its doors. Before that evening Naomi DeVeaux, the PCSB's deputy director, reported that over 12 board members and staff visited the charter. Through the hearing and the visits the board determined that real positive change was in the process of taking place at Potomac Preparatory.
But the school did not get off scot-free. The PCSB imposed 18 conditions upon the continuance of the school's charter that take it through the 2017 to 2018 school year. The meeting of these conditions appears to be a tough climb for the charter but then again the reversing of the determination to close a school is highly unusual.
Next on the agenda was whether to begin the revocation procedures for the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy. The sad stories around this charter's finances are now well known. There have been payments reaching millions of dollars to the school's management company run by Kent Amos, the founder of Community Academy. Many of the duties supposedly performed by the management company over the last two years, including building maintenance, information technology, food services, special education services, English language learner services, and personnel services, were duplicated by school staff. Beginning in 2007 the management company received over a million dollars per year for under their agreement with the school which rose to over 2 million dollars in fiscal year 2012. The board found that during the over the last five years there were usually only three members of the management company; Mr. Amos, his wife, and his stepson.
Community Academy currently runs four campuses, one of which is on-line and serves over $1,500 students. In the school's 2013 fiscal year it ran almost a 2 million dollar loss. In the current fiscal year the financial performance of the charter has improved but this has come as a result of decreasing the amount of money spend on educating their students by almost $2,000 a pupil.
Well known attorneys A. Scott Bolden and Federick Cooke, Jr. then appeared before the board to defend the school. Mr. Bolden is representing the charter while Mr. Cooke is the attorney for the management company and Mr. Amos. Their arguments against revocation centered on three lines of reasoning. First they said that the court case involving Community Academy and the management contract has not yet resulted in any issuing of statements of facts. They also made the case that the staff's findings regarding the school were inaccurate. Finally, and this is the most depressing part of their testimony, the gentleman explained that the court has already devised a resolution of this issue by disallowing any further payments from the charter to the outside firm and by having the school hire as its own employees the staff members of the management company including Mr. Amos. In the end the board felt that the terms of the outside contract and the school board's failure to properly oversee the agreement demonstrated a pattern of fiscal mismanagement. They voted to begin the charter revocation procedure.
On a more positive note, Paul Public Charter School was granted a new 15 year charter despite recent problems regarding erasure of stray marks on this year's DC CAS standardized exam. If you want to see how a strong charter leader presents information before the PCSB please review the remarks of Paul CEO Jami Dunham on this evening. I interviewed Ms. Dunham last summer.
In DC's confusing thicket of school choice, there's a guide for those who need help the most
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
December 16, 2014
Families in DC have an abundance of school options. But many low-income families don't have access to the information they need to make good choices.
Some argue that school choice will ultimately result in a better education system, as families gravitate to schools that perform well. The best schools will flourish, according to this view, and competition will force the lower-performing schools to improve. But for that system to work fairly, all families need the same opportunity to make an informed choice.
With DC's school lottery opening this week, many parents are beginning to consider their options for next school year. And there's no shortage of them: nearly half of DC students opt to attend a DC Public School other than the one they're assigned to, and 45% of DC students are enrolled in a charter school.
There's plenty of information about all of these options available online: DC Public Schools offers profiles for each of its schools, and the Public Charter School Board uses an evaluation system to place charter schools in one of three tiers.
In addition, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education publishes equity reports that allow people to compare DCPS and charter schools on a variety of measures. And the lottery website, MySchoolDC, consolidates information about schools and how to apply to them.
Wealthier parents often hire private consultants to help them navigate the thicket of choices. Many middle-class families at least consult a website like GreatSchools.org, which rates schools in various cities and displays comments from parents.
Parents with few resources face obstacles
Parents with fewer resources and limited access to the Internet may be just as overwhelmed, but they're less likely to have help. In fact, they're often not even aware they have choices. If they do, they may not know where to begin in evaluating them. They may not realize they can visit a school and ask questions, and they may not have the time for that in any event.
And for parents coming to DC from places where kids just go to their neighborhood schools, it can be particularly confusing. "People were talking about the lottery, charter versus [traditional] public, out-of-boundary versus in-boundary," says Dominique Small, who moved to the District from North Carolina a couple of years ago. "I was like, what?"
Help for low-income parents
For parents like Small, an organization called DC School Reform Now can be a godsend. For the past three years, DCSRN has targeted its efforts on low-income parents in Wards 7 and 8. Its staff guides them through the school choice process from beginning to end, helping them find a school that matches their needs and priorities.
DCSRN recruits families at several DCPS and charter schools, where it focuses on transitions from elementary to middle school, or middle to high school. The staff also finds parents through preschools, homeless shelters, and community organizations.
The organization holds "movie nights" at these partner organizations, when it screens some of its 15 videos showing what various schools are like. These Virtual School Tours, which are also available on DCSRN's website, include interviews with principals, teachers, parents, and students. There are also scenes of classrooms, arrival and dismissal, lunch periods and recess, and transitions between classrooms.
DCSRN uses other kinds of outreach as well. Its executive director, David Pickens, personally knocks on doors in public housing projects where low-income families live.
Once a family signs up, they're assigned to one of DCSRN's Parent Advocates, who begin by asking what the family's priorities are. Usually, says Parent Advocate Erika Harrell, the top considerations are academics and transportation. Amenities like before- and after-care can also be important.
Parent Advocates then help families come up with a list of schools and fill out applications, usually over the phone. They remind them of deadlines, and DCSRN staff even transports parents to schools when it comes time to enroll. DC requires that parents complete the enrollment process in person.
Still, it's not always easy to connect students with high-quality schools. Families who sign up for DCSRN sometimes slip away, often because the phone number they gave was non-working or got disconnected. Harrell says last year she started with a caseload of 130 families and was able to get 85 to enter the lottery.
Overall, DSCRN recruited 769 families last year, but the number of students who actually enrolled in what it defines as a quality school was only 115. That's not just because of attrition; some students simply didn't get matched with a school they wanted.
And many families didn't get matched with a Parent Advocate in the first place, because DCSRN doesn't have enough funds to hire more than two or three, each of whom has a caseload of about 100 families.
School choice is here to stay, so we need to make it fair
Opponents of a school system based on choice argue that competition won't actually make all schools better. When families leave their struggling neighborhood schools, they drain resources and make it harder for those schools to improve. From that perspective, DCSRN is part of the problem.
While Pickens acknowledges that argument has some validity, he says DCSRN's focus is on getting each individual child the best possible education. And sometimes, he says, DCSRN is able to tell families their neighborhood school is actually better than it used to be and urge them to consider it. Generally, DCSRN doesn't favor charter schools over DCPS schools, or vice versa.
In the abstract, it may be debatable whether school choice is the best way to improve education. But the fact is, in DC, a system of choice is here to stay. And the only way to ensure that it's equitable is to try to provide busy families who have limited resources the same information that wealthier parents have.
If it hadn't been for DCSRN, says Dominique Small, "I probably would still be at my neighborhood school, and very disappointed." Instead, her two kids are at J.O. Wilson Elementary, which she says is "everything I was looking for, and then some."
Parent Advocate Erika Harrell's only frustration is that she can't reach more parents who need her help. "When I tell people what I do," she says, "they always say the same thing: Where were you when my kids were in school, because I would have loved to have had some help with this."
D.C. State Board of Education to consider early vote on new graduation requirements [E.L. Haynes PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
December 17, 2014
The D.C. State Board of Education will consider voting on revised proposed regulations Wednesday that would dramatically change the way students can earn high school credit and earn a diploma in the District, regulations that are still under public review.
The proposed regulations would permit students to test out of courses and would create a pilot program for schools to offer course credit through portfolios or internships or other experiences outside of the classroom. The regulations also would give students who pass the GED a diploma rather than a credential.
Such changes could help improve the city’s graduation rates, which are among the lowest in the country.
Most states are experimenting with alternatives to the century-old approach of tying high school credit to time in class. In the District, school leaders and the state board have been researching what is known as competency-based learning, which ties credit instead to how much students have learned, for at least two years. But proposed regulations were not circulated until last month and were posted in the D.C. Register on Nov. 28 for a 30-day comment period.
According to the D.C. Administrative Procedures Act, prior to the adoption of any rule or amendment, an agency should publish in the Register “notice of the intended action so as to afford interested persons opportunity to submit data and views either orally or in writing, as may be specified in such notice.”
It says the notice “shall be made not less that thirty days prior to the effective date of the proposed adoption, amendment, or repeal.”
But Christina Setlow, director of policy, legislative, and intergovernmental affairs for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, said that she understands it to be “an allowable practice” for the State Board of Education to vote before the public comment period is over. She said that the regulations are not final until they are published in the D.C. Register.
“Voting does not make it final,” she said, noting that votes can happen before the 30-day period is up. If the regulations change substantively as a result of comments, she said, OSSE would have to go back for another vote from the State Board.
The regulations already have been revised once since they were originally published on Nov. 28.
Jesse Rauch, executive director of the State Board of Education, said he could recall two times that the board voted during the comment period, though he did not specify which votes those were.
Kevin Goldberg, president of the D.C. Open Government Coalition, said he was “befuddled” by OSSE’s interpretation of the law.
“What is the point of a 30-day public comment period if you could vote on Day 2?” he said.
The policy change has broad support from many quarters, including from D.C. schools chancellor Kaya Henderson, who called it “huge priority,” and from some prominent charter school leaders who have been experimenting with the concept of competency-based learning. Jennifer Niles, the founder of EL Haynes Public Charter School and the next deputy mayor for education, also has advocated for competency-based learning.
City education officials are hoping the new rules will be approved this month, so they can take effect by next school year. But the specifics of the proposed regulations have raised many questions without much time to debate them.
Cathy Reilly, a long-time advocate for high schools in the city, sent out an “URGENT” e-mail advisory to the Ward 4 Education Alliance, asking parents to sign up to testify and weigh in on the regulations Wednesday.
“The vast majority of the people that will be affected by this do not know about it and have not had a chance to think about it,” she wrote in a separate e-mail.
She said there is support for the concept, but that some parents and educators are concerned about ”reducing education to assessments or even portfolios” and “not allowing for exposure to things that might not be tested or in the standards.”
While a mastery-based system might be well-suited to some subjects such as math or foreign languages, Reilly questioned whether students should rush through U.S. History or world literature courses.
“For most students, this is the only exposure they will get to the content in these core areas,” she said. “There is concern that this will help students graduate more quickly, perhaps, but not a guarantee that they will be better educated.”
OSSE proposes to maintain a standard of quality by convening a panel that will evaluate proposed alternative course plans and by rolling out the new policy slowly.
But the idea of granting each school a different metric for determining whether a student has mastered course material raises concerns that students will have difficulty transferring those credits between schools, something thousands of high school students must do each year.
Setlow said OSSE has been “informally gathering comments” from private schools, home school, D.C. Public Schools, charter schools, and parents.
“We don’t see it as a rushed process. The State Board has been asking for this for a few years,” she said.
D.C. judge dismisses 18-year-old special education lawsuit, giving control to schools
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
December 16, 2014
A U.S. district judge on Tuesday dismissed an 18-year-old special-education lawsuit against the District’s public school system, ending judicial oversight of how school administrators respond to families awaiting services for students with disabilities.
City leaders hailed Judge Paul Friedman’s decision, marking it as a vote of confidence that the city’s education reform efforts are paying off.
The decision allows the schools to administer special-education services without a court-appointed monitor routinely checking in and reviewing files to track performance.
“This is a huge day for the District and for children with disabilities,” Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said during a news conference at the Wilson Building after the dismissal. “Our education agencies worked tirelessly to achieve this goal.”
Gray detailed many improvements to the city’s special-education services, including more speedy delivery. He said the number of formal complaints from families has dropped significantly. He also said the number of children with disabilities who were placed in private schools at taxpayer expense — because public schools could not meet their needs — declined by 56 percent, from 2,204 to 975. That exceeds a goal Gray set early in his administration.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson thanked the “teachers, paraprofessionals, special- education coordinators, psychologists, social workers, related service providers, case managers, administrators, school leaders, compliance team leaders, attorneys and special-education program staff members” for their hard work, which she said shows that the city schools should be allowed to oversee special-education services.
“We inspired enough confidence in the courts that we put the systems in place that we will never go back to the times of dysfunction and lack of services that used to characterize DCPS,” Henderson said.
Friedman dismissed the Jones portion of what is known as the Blackman-Jones case, a combination of two 1997 class-action lawsuits against D.C. Public Schools on behalf of students with disabilities. The lawsuits claimed that the school system violated federal special-education law in the way it handled administrative hearings for parents who requested adequate services for their children.
In the Blackman case, parents said that due-process hearings were not scheduled and decisions were not issued in a timely way. In the Jones case, parents said that once a settlement agreement was reached, the school system did not provide the services requested.
The judge ruled in favor of the parents, but nearly a decade later the schools were still out of compliance. In 2006, the school system entered into a settlement with the parents that required the city to meet three goals: Eliminate a backlog of more than 2,000 pending hearing-officer decisions and settlement agreements; make sure that at least 90 percent of such determinations and agreements are reached in a timely manner for a 12-month period; and have no cases more than 90 days overdue for implementation of services.
A court-appointed monitor tracked the city’s progress, and two years later, the first requirement was met when the backlog was eliminated. The Blackman part of the case was dismissed in 2011.
A year later, a federal court released the District from oversight in a separate 1995 class-action lawsuit known as Petties v. D.C. , which related to making prompt payments to private schools and transporting students with disabilities to school safely, reliably and on time.
In a motion filed this fall, former attorney general Irvin B. Nathan wrote that the city had made steady progress in the only remaining case. As of this past summer, the city reported that more than 90 percent of hearing- officer decisions and settlement agreements had been implemented in a timely way during the preceding year, and no cases were more than 90 days overdue for implementation. On Tuesday, the judge affirmed that progress.
The U.S. Department of Education, which provides special-education funding to the District, also this year noted progress in services, though the District remains a “high risk” jurisdiction by federal standards.
Officials with the Office of the State Superintendent of Education said that for the first time in the city’s history, it has made enough progress to be removed from tighter federal control in two areas: timeliness of hearing-officer determinations and of transitioning young children into early special-education services.
The federal government is still monitoring some other areas, including the timeliness of the city’s initial and subsequent evaluations, as well as compliance with a requirement to develop transition plans for special-education students who are preparing for life beyond high school.
“The District was at 0 percent compliance in 2008, and now we are at 73 percent compliant,” said Amy Maisterra, assistant superintendent for elementary, secondary and specialized education for OSSE. “We have seen really good improvement. They want to see us at closer to 100 percent.”