This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 5, 2012 - Starting a charter school isn’t easy. But based on the experience of the Renaissance Academy Math & Science Charter in Kansas City, closing one is no picnic either.
The academy, which closed at the end of the 2011-2012 school year, was the first Missouri charter to close not because it was forced to but because its board decided not to renew its charter. Plagued by poor academic performance, governance problems and a rocky relationship with its management company, Imagine schools, the board voted in March 2011 not to renew its charter, then fired Imagine and ran the school on its own for its final year of existence.
Along the way, it dealt with angry parents and staff, confusion about whether it really was going to close and a fuzzy roadmap about how it should actually go about shutting its doors forever.
Deb Carr of the University of Missouri-Columbia, which was the school’s sponsor, said everyone involved had to figure things out as they went along, including the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. At the same time as it was monitoring the closing in Kansas City, DESE was shutting down Imagine’s schools in St. Louis.
“The lack of processes really hurt all of us,” Carr told a session of the Missouri Charter Public School Association’s annual conference at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel Thursday. “But what we did accomplish was very clear communication. We didn’t want any surprises.”
For the school year that came between the vote to close the academy and the actual shutdown, its enrollment remained at 1,100, said Dana Tippin Cutler, who acted as the school’s legal counsel. She said the budget for the shutdown was about $1 million, which came from savings once the board severed its relationship with Imagine.
For the current school year, about 50 percent of Renaissance's student body has transferred to other Kansas City charter schools, with 25 percent attending class in the Kansas City Public Schools and the rest choosing a variety of other options, from private schools to home schooling.
No need to wait
At the end of the third year of the school’s five-year charter, in 2010, Mizzou education officials brought up the question of renewal, Cutler said, rather than wait until later in the process. “The board took a look at itself and said, ‘Perhaps we need to close this down,’” she said.
Carr noted that even after the academy’s first two years, problems with student test scores and governance had become apparent, but she and her colleagues at the university wanted to make sure that any application to renew the charter came from the board.
Suzanne Love, also at the university, added: “We knew that the school would have an uphill battle.”
Board members began looking around for alternative sponsors, universities that were looking to accept new charters, and also began looking into what justification they could use to make an argument to DESE that the school should continue.
Tomika Booker, president of the board, explained the thinking this way: “Our biggest question was to look at the current culture and change that culture …. We needed to change the focus for staff and students from extracurricular activities to education and teaching. We needed students to learn and teachers to teach.”
Imagine, which had been the school’s management company from the start, had been responsible for many duties that the board now wanted to take on. It transferred control of its funds from Imagine to the board and put procedures into place that took back accountability from the management company.
Board member Yolanda Carson said, “Once you control the money, you control everything else.”
The board hired an accounting firm, a consultant and a legal team to help take care of the duties that Imagine had been performing, impressing the sponsors at Mizzou.
“We were thinking, ‘All right, they are becoming better stewards of the funds they have,’” Love said. “This was their first major step in taking control of school operations. It was a really big deal.”
Added Carr: “My first thought was that this is absolutely the right thing to do. It was pivotal. It was the first time the board was really in the driver’s seat for this school.”
As the realization dawned that renewal was not a good option, the board decided to take the issue to the public at its February meeting, then vote. But that session, where it was standing room only, was so contentious that the board decided to postpone the vote and instead let the crowd vent its frustrations.
It did, for more than three hours.
“These were not faces that were greeting you with smiles,” said Booker, the board president. “It was very painful. The majority of comments were very personal to me. We had staff who worked for us and we were paying say cruel things to us. They had no respect for us.
“But that evening had to take place in order for us to move forward.”
The final year
The board was ready for a repeat performance the next month, when the final decision was scheduled, but to its surprise the crowd was small, the meeting was civil and the vote was anticlimactic.
Then, a different kind of work began. The closure was not going to happen for another 15 months, so the board had to take over operations, find a new building, arrange for all the services a school needs, hire staff, answer questions and deal with the repercussions of its actions, particularly the end of its relationship with Imagine.
“There was political pressure,” Carr said. “There were a lot of issues centered around that while we were still in the process of opening for another school year.”
Plus, many parents simply did not believe that the school would really be closing.
“They still had not pieced together that we had to complete this final school year, but come June 2012, it was over,” Booker said. “They thought the board had come around. We opened in August, and I truly believe the parents thought everything was OK.”
A transition team was put into place to make sure everything went smoothly, from student transfers to the handling of records.
“What we had to agree on first,” said Carr, “was what would be our guiding principle, and that principle was to keep the kids first in everything we did. How were we, in the midst of all this, going to keep the focus on these kids and give them the best school year we could?”
Love said the process was guided by a trio of guidelines.
“The three words that kept coming to mind,” she said, “was to be thoughtful about everything, be thorough so that we were proactive and trying to anticipate what was going to happen, and be transparent. We didn’t want people to have questions. We wanted them to have facts about the situation.”
School property that was paid for by public dollars went to other schools in a lottery, a process that is still going on. Enrollment fairs for students and job fairs for faculty and staff were arranged to help everyone make as easy a transition as possible. And the lines of communication with DESE were kept open, to make sure that state officials were aware of what was happening each step along the way.
With all the hard work involved, how did the process run as smoothly as it did?
“We started building relationships when the charter began,” said Love, “so we were able to work as a team.”
Carr added:
“We didn’t always agree, but we respected each other.”