More Macon Charter issues surface at Bibb school board meeting

More problems surfaced for Macon Charter Academy at Thursday’s committee meeting of the Bibb County Board of Education.

Keith Simmons, the district’s chief of staff, delivered a presentation about the Georgia Department of Education’s recommendation to begin the process of terminating the school’s charter.

Even though Simmons said termination is likely, he reminded the board that several steps remained, including a formal hearing.

“I do want the board to know that the effort of the state Department of Education is its recommendation to the state Board of Education,” Simmons said.

In addition to the issues that were presented in a letter earlier this month from the state department to MCA, Simmons outlined other apparent problems. For one, MCA’s leadership intended to administer the Georgia Milestones online to 100 percent of its students as recently as March 10.

That plan changed, putting the district “in a crunch,” Simmons said.

“In fact, they would need paper and pencil assessments for all their students,” he said.

Not only was testing an issue for the district, but it also presented problems for students going forward. For students in Bibb County’s traditional schools, reading and math assessments that factor into promotion or retention will be administered online so that scores will be back in time to determine which students need to retest or enroll in a summer program.

“Obviously, their results will not be coming back as quickly as ours,” board member Sue Sipe said of the hard-copy tests MCA’s students will take.

MCA’s leaders were advised to prepare summer programs to help students that came up short of the mark on assessments that are required to move on to the next grade. With the school’s future in question and district leaders uncertain where those students will go, either to district schools or other “school choice options,” Simmons said it would be tough to accommodate them in the district’s Summer Opportunity Program.

“I’m not quite sure that we will be able to develop a program that will be able to encompass those students,” he said.

Prestige Charter School Solutions, a company that assists charter schools with front office operations and other functions, was contracted to help the school gain stability.

“That particular entity has provided a notice of departure,” Simmons said Thursday.

It was Simmons’ understanding that the terms of that notice, which district officials learned about earlier this week, were such that Prestige would remain with MCA through June if the school elected to surrender its charter voluntarily. Otherwise, Prestige will cut ties with MCA.

Ed Grant, president of the school’s governing board said that parents and other stakeholders with the school had expressed no intent to go quietly.

“They’re not going to surrender the charter,” Grant said.

While Grant said that district staff members had been helpful to him and MCA, he said there were some items presented as fact in the state’s letter that were false.

For one, he said MCA had paid the $65,000 in late payroll taxes and that the IRS forgave the associated penalty because the school is a new entity. Further, he said an incident when a larger student was moving a chair with it over his head had been misconstrued.

“But the state assessed that he was picking up the chair to throw it across the room,” Grant said.

Perhaps the biggest concerns for the district, Simmons said, related to the actions of the adults at the school. He pointed to teachers that had not completed their portion of the evaluation procedure “despite several requests” to do so, whether because they didn’t see the importance or just failed to complete it on time.

“That speaks directly to the culture and climate, particularly of the adults that are providing instruction to our students,” Simmons said.

With closure of the school seeming likely, he discussed the contingency plan currently in the works for moving students back into the district’s zoned schools, if parents chose that route. That process could be a lengthy one, since the state school board isn’t scheduled to meet until the first week of May.

“We’re working on a plan; it’s not finalized yet,” Jones said.

The Bibb school board also got its first look at a revised policy for dealing with new charter schools that would outline the full charter process, from the school’s petition for a charter to termination, if needed.

The Academy for Classical Education opened in north Bibb County in 2014, followed by MCA in 2015. Since then, the Bloomfield Preparatory Academy and the Dream Academy have applied for approval, with the latter electing to go for state approval after hitches in the local process.

“As we all know, in the past two years there has been a large interest in locally-approved charter schools in our district,” said legal counsel Randy Howard.

The board will next meet on May 10 for a budget session, followed by its regular monthly meetings on May 19, with the committee meeting scheduled to start at 4 p.m.

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 7:46 PM with the headline "More Macon Charter issues surface at Bibb school board meeting."