LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Board of Education voted unanimously Monday to revoke the charter for the cash strapped Little Rock Urban Collegiate Charter School For Young Men, permanently closing the school beginning today for 262 boys in kindergarten through eighth grades.
Parents of the pupils - several of whom shouted out in protest and wept at the board’s vote - must now f ind other schools for their children 21/2 months before the end of the school year.
The charter school provided families with contact numbers Monday afternoon for school registration officials in the surrounding Little Rock, North Little Rock and Pulaski County Special school districts where most of the pupils live and are eligible to enroll.
The Education Board on Monday also revoked the charter for the 78-student Osceola Communication, Arts and Business School, effective at the end of the current 2010-11 school year, because the 3-year-old school designed to target or “recover” high school dropouts had veered away from its stated mission.
The state board on Monday also approved - after much discussion about the effect on desegregation efforts in the Little Rock School District - raising the enrollment cap at the e-Stem Elementary Public Charter School in downtown Little Rock by more than 25 percent, from 360 to 462 pupils beginning with the coming 2011-12 school year.
Urban Collegiate had opened last July in the former Lutheran High School at Markham and South Hughes streets, west of Park Plaza Mall, in Little Rock. The school - which has a virtually all-black enrollment - offered a rigorous curriculum, including foreign languages and business education, to pupils recruited from low-income areas of the city.
“It’s our first year - come on, guys,” Jackie Jackson, founder and executive director of Urban Collegiate School for Young Men, told state Education Board members when board member Brenda Gullett of Fayetteville, “with a heavy heart,” made the motion to revoke the school’s charter.
Representatives of the state Department of Education and the school agreed Monday that Urban Collegiate has projected to end this school year with an illegal budget deficit of $253,647. As of Monday, the school had just over $5,000 in the bank and a payroll of more than $70,000 to make today.
Jackson said the school would make the payroll by drawing on a $100,000 line of credit. The money would be reimbursed when the school received $106,000 in revenue it was expecting from different sources, including federal and state agencies.She also argued to the Education Board that the school could erase the projected year-end deficit in part by getting reimbursements from the federal government for services provided to students.
School leaders, she said, also had plans to seek grants that are available for schools that target low-income families and to conduct fundraisers, including a future golf tournament. The school also planned to rent out its gymnasium.
But Arkansas Education Commissioner Tom Kimbrell and Assistant Commissioner for Finance Bill Goff were not optimistic about the likelihood of the school’s ability to offset a quarter million dollars in debt.
“At this point, I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Goff told the board.
“We are not comfortable with it. We have grave concerns,” Kimbrell said about the debt this year and school’s prospects for financial stability in 2011-12. He said it would be in the best interests of the students to revoke the charter.
One upset audience member rose to take the microphone. “I am a parent. Where will these children go to school?” she demanded.
“We can’t allow schools to operate with that kind of debt,” said Board President Naccaman Williams of Springdale.
Earlier in the meeting, Jackson explained the sources of the school’s financial troubles, which included giving the state an erroneously high enrollment figure of 596 pupils as of July 30. That figure served as the basis for state aid of about $299,000 a month for six months. Revised enrollment numbers in October showed a student count of about 300, resulting in a decrease in state funding to about $89,000 a month.
The enrollment has dropped over time in part, Jackson said, because some families didn’t want to abide by the discipline policies and dress codes that require the boys to wear ties and blazers every day.
State officials learned from KARK-TV, Channel 4, in February that the school had difficulty meeting a payroll that month, prompting a review and discovery of $95,000 in unpaid invoices dating back to September.
Jackson explained that financial advisers to the school had failed to make timely reports to the state, a fact she was unaware of for several months.
Since then, the school sought and found other financial consultants.
Alicia Washington, the mother of boys in third and sixth grades, wiped tears from her eyes after the meeting as she pondered where her children would land.
Earlier, she told the board she had “bounced” her children around to different schools but couldn’t find the “perfect” place until they began attending Urban Collegiate last summer.
“I was thrilled about the spirit of the place,” she said, recounting how her youngest son who had a penchant for pretending to be ill to avoid school announced to his mother that he now wanted to go to school even when he was really ill.
“I can send my boys to that school and know they will be taken care of,” Washington told the board.
Clementine Mimms, a grandmother to a kindergartner at the school, said after the board vote that she was uncertain what her family would do about finding a new school.
“To eject a child out of a school - and he only has a few more months to go - it’s going to be devastating to him,” Mimms said.
Like Mimms, Vicki Hatter, the mother of an eighth-grader at the school, had pleaded with the state board to preserve the school, saying her son had come to believe that it was “OK” to be smart and to talk about his interest in horses and to take on leadership opportunities.
“They have allowed my son to have the opportunity to shine,” Hatter said.
“It’s just not right to have children who are succeeding to be pulled back into failing schools,” an emotional Hatter said after the meeting about the prospect of going to a traditional public school.
“We have failing schools that we know are failing and where they aren’t teaching children, and yet they continue to be funded. It’s sad, really sad.”
While the Education Board has revoked charters before - three last year in Hope, Humphrey and Osceola - Monday was the first time the state Education Board has revoked two at one time.
Ray Cooper, the third director of the Osceola Communication, Arts and Business School, asked the board for a year to refocus the school on helping former dropouts up to age 22 to obtain diplomas. He said the school was forming a partnership with SAI-Tech, a national organization that provides education programs at federally funded Job Corps Centers, to refine its program.
Of the school’s 76 students, only five are “out-of-school youth,” although others are over-age for their grade level, have children or other characteristics that put them at risk of school failure.
Education Board members told the Osceola charter school representatives that it might be best if the community, which has been supportive of the school, start fresh with a revamped charter school plan that targets younger students before they leave school.
E-Stem Elementary Public Charter School officials had asked last year for permission to increase enrollment but were turned down because the school had been put on alert that its black pupils and poor pupils had failed to meet state achievement requirements on the Benchmark Exam. Those achievement goals have now been met.
The increased enrollment is designed to provide some relief to the school’s waiting list, which currently stands at 1,695 pupils, e-Stem Executive Director John Bacon said. Chris Heller, an attorney for the Little Rock School District, which is challenging the state in federal court over its approval of charter schools in Pulaski County, argued against the increase.
Board members Gullett and Sam Ledbetter of Little Rock pressed Education Department officials to provide information showing whether the students who attend charter schools in Pulaski County previously attended magnet schools or participated in majority-to-minority programs in the traditional school districts in Pulaski County.
The Little Rock district has been pushing the state for that information, along with student test scores and economic status, as part of its case against the state on charter schools.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/15/2011