As closure looms, school leaders share lessons learned from ordeal

Macon Charter Academy will close its doors in the coming days — perhaps for the last time — but those involved in the project say they’ve learned plenty of lessons.

After a hearing Aug. 18, the state school board voted to terminate the school’s charter, with closure set for Wednesday.

“It’s almost beyond words to share what I have personally learned from this,” said Monya Rutland, one of the school’s co-founders and its current governing board president.

With students still being processed out of the school and families deciding where to take them, Rutland said that she and the other governing board members hadn’t decided whether to appeal the termination or not. If they do — and were successful in reopening Macon Charter down the road — she said the school’s past wouldn’t be forgotten.

Instead, she said she would hope to document the journey from opening to state probation to closure and make it “required viewing or reading” for anyone who hopes to become involved with MCA. In fact, Rutland said she could teach an entire class about the last year or so at the school.

“Macon Charter shows what can happen when people don’t agree, what can happen when you’re perceived a certain way,” she said.

Rutland maintains that media reports from the beginning painted Macon Charter in a bad light, when the school was really just experiencing the growing pains of a new charter school. MCA completed just one full school year and is less than a month into a second.

“Because it is new, because everyone is learning, you don’t have to take an adverse or negative posture toward something new,” she said.

She also said the school’s struggles were almost a microcosm of the educational climate in Bibb County, particularly with regard to reform topics such as the charter movement.

“Macon Charter’s history is Bibb County’s history,” she said. “All of Macon Charter’s bumps, bruises, warts are Bibb County’s.”

Curtis Jones, Bibb County’s school superintendent, said he hoped the district could fix some of those bump and bruises, using what’s been discovered in the Macon Charter experience. Specifically, he pointed to the oversight protocol for charter schools.

“My belief is that we’ve learned that the monitoring process for us is more rigorous than what we had initially started with,” he said.

From now on, the district will look more carefully at the governing board and other leadership at proposed charters. MCA has had three principals and four governing boards while only completing one school year.

Jones also said charter school leadership teams would continue to meet with district officials each month to discuss specific accountability measures and how provisions of the school’s charter — the contract it operates under — were being met.

“Sometimes you give individual schools autonomy, and we have to be aware of what that autonomy actually looks like,” he said.

The importance of a strong leadership team was also the key takeaway from the MCA situation for Glenn Hileman, the CEO of Highmark School Development. Highmark provided financial backing for the school’s Madison Street facility.

“While there are many variables associated with a high-performance school, having a strong and cohesive board is critical,” Hileman wrote in an email. “School leadership must be aligned with the mission and vision of the charter school.”

Hileman said Highmark would continue to seek a new tenant for the building. Since it was built to be a school campus with a gym, auditorium and other educational features, he said the most suitable option would be another charter school.

Further, Highmark will be maintaining and securing the property once Macon Charter moves out, and it will be responsible for paying the rent to Education Capital Solutions, the owner of the building.

“We are currently considering our legal options, but Highmark is still responsible for paying rent to the owner of the property under its master lease,” Hileman wrote.

Parents have continued to support the school, even as leaders prepare to shut the doors. Some of the students are expected to remain in the school until Wednesday, and at least one parent went to Atlanta to testify during the state hearing.

“Just the encouragement, it was much appreciated,” Rutland said.

Jones asked for the same support from those parents whose students flow back into other district schools.

“They were engaged, and they should be engaged in our schools as well,” Jones said.

This story was originally published August 26, 2016 at 5:45 PM with the headline "As closure looms, school leaders share lessons learned from ordeal."