- Charter Board has Spent $1 Million to Close Failed Schools [IDEAL Academy and William E. Doar Jr. PCS are mentioned]
- D.C. Charters Deplete Reserves Bailing Out Schools
- Harry Jaffe: Gray Makes Progress on Education, Environment
- Henderson, Gray Introduce New Plan for D.C. Schools
Charter Board has Spent $1 Million to Close Failed Schools [IDEAL Academy and William E. Doar Jr. PCS are mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
April 26, 2012
Twelve public charter schools and campuses of two others have closed their doors over the last four years. They either shut down on their own, often for financial reasons, or were put out of business by the D.C. Public Charter School Board over academic or governance issues.
In theory, the District is not responsible for debts or other obligations left behind by the independent, non-profit boards that operate the schools. In practice, the city has spent a little over $1 million since 2008 closing out failed charter schools, executive director Scott Pearson told the D.C. Council on Tuesday.
Pearson said some of the money has helped strapped schools pay their bills so that they don’t put students on the street before the end of the. academic year. Other funds have been used to meet teacher payroll. The tab would have been higher, Pearson said, if the board didn’t have pro-bono counsel to cover litigation costs. (The board plans to hire a general counsel).
“To close a school with integrity, we see it as our responsibility to make sure that the students’ learning is minimally disrupted and that they end up at better schools, whether traditional or public charter,” Pearson said in his prepared testimony.
The most expensive of the four years was 2011, according to board figures. It spent $438,632 as SAIL and Thea Bowman relinquished their charters and Nia Community was closed for poor academic performance. IDEAL and William E. Doar Jr. also voluntarily closed their high school campuses.
According to a chronology provided by the board, 80 schools across 117 campuses have been opened—either by the charter board or the old Board of Education—since 1996, when the School Reform Act paved the way for the city’s charter sector. Twenty-eight have closed, a failure rate of 35 percent. That’s more than twice the national rate of 15 percent, according to the Center for Education Reform, a charter research and advocacy group. The total price tag is anybody’s guess.
Pearson said the board has never set aside money for closing costs, but would earmark $150,000 for that contingency in fiscal year 2013. The board did not ask for extra funding from the City Council. Pearson has, however proposed an increase in the annual administrative fee paid by charter schools to help support the board’s oversight role.
The Washington Examiner
By Lisa Gartner
April 26, 2012
The DC Public Charter School Board has spent more than $1.1 million bailing out closing schools over the last five years, including $438,632 in last school year alone.
As a result of these charges, and a reduction in funding by the state school agency, the charters' reserves dropped from $1.4 million in 2010 to $330,000 in 2011.
Scott Pearson, executive director of the charter school board, said increasing the fee each charter pays to the board for oversight is critical to improving those reserves.
And beginning in fiscal 2013, Pearson said the board will budget $150,000 for two school closures.
"[Board members] never knew when they were doing the budget if there would be a school closure, because it's a contingent thing," he told The Washington Examiner. But Pearson, who was appointed in December, says it's prudent to do so.
Thirteen charter schools were closed between the 2007-2008 school year and last school year.
While $150,000 covers the average cost of closing two schools, the price tag can be much higher. When a school goes bankrupt, the board foots the bill to keep it open through the end of the school year and sometimes must pay its payroll taxes so teachers can get their W-2 Forms.
At a minimum, a school's closure costs $20,000 to $40,000 because enrollment specialists are brought in to place students at new schools.
The costliest closure in recent years was the Young America Works Public Charter School, at $329,664, followed by the School for Arts in Learning -- the downtown school that closed last year -- at $201,589.
Financial issues shutter 43 percent of charters, while 30 percent are closed for poor academics and 27 percent for mismanagement.
"It was a disaster," Pearson said of Young America. "It went belly up midyear with no cash."
The board has added safeguards to detect financial problems before a total collapse, Pearson said.
It also is considering expanding the 0.05 percent fee it takes on each charter's local funding stream to include all of the schools' public revenue, including federal funding. In addition to the cost of closures, the charter board received $675,000 less than it was expecting from D.C.'s Office of the State Superintendent of Education in 2011.
The fee increase would generate about $500,000 for the board, which is projecting a shortfall of $617,847 in fiscal 2013, and cost each charter about $16 per student.
The average fee leveled on charters nationwide is 2.6 percent.
David Pickens, executive director of DC School Reform Now, still likened the proposed fee increase to "a charter tax."
"Ideally you want every dollar given to charters to go to raising student achievement," Pickens said. "If I'm [an underperforming] school, there would be some reluctance on my part to fund school closures."
The Washington Examiner
By Harry Jaffe
April 26, 2012
Mayor Vincent Gray is almost a year and a half into his term, and I am beginning to believe he's finally getting the hang of the job. Enough with the town hall meetings, Vince is starting to govern.
Pity, then, that the rumor mill inside the Wilson Building is rife with reports that federal prosecutors are getting closer to handing down indictments in the investigation of Gray's mayoral campaign. These rumors come and go, so I don't put much stock in them. My sources in the U.S. Attorney's Office were tight-lipped, as always.
For the first time since Gray took office, I'm starting to appreciate the way he's running the government and the direction he's taking the city. It's been about a year since accounts of the cronyism and corruption of his first months dominated the news. You know, his top aides and "trusted friends" like Lorraine Green and others doling out jobs to kith and kin. You remember, reports of Gray's campaign aides funneling cash to candidate Sulaimon Brown, who would then harass incumbent Adrian Fenty.
We'll have to wait for federal prosecutors to sort through the facts, but in the meantime, Vince Gray and his agency heads are making progress, in three realms: education, environment and development. I figure they deserve some credit, with a nod toward Fenty's people, many of whom are still in the government.
In education, Gray has been wise enough to embrace and support Chancellor Kaya Henderson. Near as I can tell, he has backed her in budget battles. He stood by her side last week when she rolled out her five-year plan. He has yet to face the fire that will flare up when Henderson has to close schools, perhaps as many as a dozen. Will "Uncle Vince" be able to deliver bad news to neighborhoods that elected him mayor? We shall see.
This week Gray continued his long-standing drive to begin educating kids early and follow them through to actually getting jobs. What a concept! Gray started to beef up the city's early childhood education programs years ago. He made sure Henderson included them in her five-year plan. Good move.
On environmental matters, I am a big fan of Harriet Tregoning's 20-year plan for the continued greening of the capital city. When I was a kid, we imagined a future depicted on "The Jetsons," a cartoon with characters zipping around in flying machines. Gray and Tregoning rolled out a vision of a city where people will walk and bike and eat veggies from farms on the tops of buildings. Sounds fantastic, right?
But change is afoot. Gray's development boss, Victor Hoskins, has finally inked a deal that will see a 2.2 million-square-foot project built over the Center Leg Freeway, between downtown and Capitol Hill. The project was conceived in 1986, when Marion Barry was mayor. Hoskins finally landed it. The "farms" will be on the roofs.
Call it far-fetched, but at least Vince Gray and his team are climbing out of the pit they created for themselves.
The Washington Informer
By James Wright
April 26, 2012
The chancellor of the District of Columbia public schools and the mayor presented a new plan to improve student performance, increase math and reading proficiency on standardized tests and boost graduation rates.
Chancellor Kaya Henderson and D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray announced a five-year strategic plan, titled "A Capital Commitment," which is an aggressive effort to rebuild the public schools system, during a press conference at the John A. Wilson Building in Northwest on Wed., April 18.
"This is the last year of the five-year plan that my predecessor [Michelle Rhee] put into place a few years ago," said Henderson, 40.
"We want to build on those achievements that have taken place such as hiring staff for schools, paying people on time, and making sure that students have textbooks. We want to move more aggressively and urgently to promises that we made to our stakeholders that our students will be better educated."
The plan will help guide spending and programming decisions through 2017 and some of the goals include: increasing District-wide math and reading proficiency to 70 percent while doubling the number of students who score at advanced levels of proficiency; improving the proficiency rates for the 40 lowest performing schools by 40 percentage points; increasing high school graduation rates from 53 to 75 percent; ensuring that 90 percent of students like the schools they attend; and increase overall District of Columbia Public School (DCPS) attendance.
Gray, 69, backs Henderson fully.
"As I said in the State of the District Address in February, every child in every neighborhood in our city deserves the opportunity to gain a first-rate public education," he said. "This plan will move us into the District's next phase of school reform, building on our recent successes and capitalizing on the dramatic population and economic growth our city has seen in recent years."
One way to reach the goals of the plan is to extend the school day and school year.
"We have found that school ending at 3 p.m. does not work for anyone," Gray said. "By having an extended school day, we can have after-school programs that can help our students academically."
On the matter of year-round school, he said that the late August to June time frame is "an agrarian concept" that is outdated. "We need to rethink these truisms," he said. Matilda Carter, a parent with school-aged children, agrees.
"I am for a longer school year 100 percent," Carter, 46, said. "We need longer school days because so many of our youth are latchkey children [because] they have nobody to go home to after school. A longer school day would reduce crime and keep them involved at least until 6 p.m. when the parents come home."
One aspect that is undefined in Henderson's plan is the closing of some schools. The chancellor said that part of the plan will be addressed in the near future. Henderson said that parental involvement and making sure that high school students will be ready for standardized tests for higher education will be priorities.
"We have to engage parents differently," she said. "When parents are involved, children do better and so do the schools." Henderson said that she's working on a pilot program to have a firm that prepares suburban students for college admission standardized tests work with District students.
Washington Teachers' Union president Nathan Saunders said that the plan is headed in the right direction but needs to go farther. "To improve the quality of education of all students, it is imperative for schools to spend more time on tasks and less time on testing," he said.
"We must acknowledge that education not only happens in classrooms, but also in our homes and communities, making it essential to secure and maintain the support of teachers, parents and students as the plan is implemented over the next five years."
Carter, a resident of Kingman Park in Ward 7, said that Henderson is on the right track.
"Our children must be able to compete in a global market," Carter said. "It takes a village to raise one child and parents and teachers have to work together to ensure a quality education for all of our children in the District of Columbia."
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