North Carolina charter school officials Monday asked a state board to stop public funding for Gastonia’s Ridgeview Charter School, a high-poverty K-8 school with low test scores.
The school opened in 2019, which means it has only had two years of full academic data because of pandemic disruptions. In both years, the school was rated F for academic performance, with proficiency ratings of 13% and a failure to meet targets for student growth.
More than 80% of Ridgeview’s students are considered economically disadvantaged, which often corresponds with low scores. However, the charter school’s students didn’t do as well as economically disadvantaged students in Gaston County Schools. In math, 9.3% of economically disadvantaged students at Ridgeview earned grade-level scores, compared with 37.7% in Gaston County Schools. In reading, proficiency for economically disadvantaged students was 16.5% at Ridgeview and 37.7% in the district.
In November, Ridgeview Principal Reshall Williams acknowledged the low scores but asked the state’s Charter Schools Review Board for five more years to get things back on track. She said her school is located in one of Gastonia’s poorest neighborhoods, where most families move in and out of apartments and the average home price is $25,000, compared with $150,000 to $250,000 countywide.
“We purposely put our school there because we wanted to give that population a great program,” she said. “However, there are a lot of challenges involved with such a transient population and such an underserved population.”
Williams said the school is working with consultants to improve academics and train faculty to work with students in poverty. She said the school also hopes to find a new location and expand from about 230 students now to 600 or more. She hopes that would increase economic and racial diversity at a school she said is now about 98% Black.
On Monday the state’s Office of Charter Schools stuck with the recommendation not to renew Ridgeview’s charter. Ridgeview is among 17 schools up for renewal, eight of them in the Charlotte region. The review board will vote on all of them next month.
Financial flag at Movement Eastland
A charter authorizes schools to receive state, local and federal money, and the renewal process is designed to make sure the schools getting that money are academically sound and financially stable.
Schools with the best records — including Community School of Davidson and Charlotte’s Sugar Creek Charter School — can get a 10-year renewal. The only other 10-year renewal candidate is Neuse Charter School in Smithfield.
Others get three, five, or seven years, depending on challenges that need to be addressed.
Shirley McFadden, a compliance manager with the Department of Public Instruction, told the review board Monday that her review of financial records for Charlotte’s Movement School Eastland revealed that the school has been operating in the red and has a $250,000 loan to the Movement Foundation coming due this year.
Eastland is one of four schools currently operated by the Charlotte-based Movement School chain, which has plans to expand across North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
“The parent company overall looks good and that’s the initial analysis that we did,” McFadden said. “When I did my review, the individual school itself does not look good.”
McFadden says the state has placed Movement School Eastland on financial disciplinary status. That means instead of the five-year renewal it had been scheduled for, it’s now being recommended for a three-year term.
In the most serious cases, the state Office of Charter Schools recommends not renewing the charter. Ridgeview is one of two being considered for nonrenewal, along with Children’s Village Academy in Kinston, a pre-K-8 school that’s been open since 1997.
North Carolina currently has 211 charter schools, which are public schools run by independent boards. The state has seen charter school enrollment grow steadily, even as most school districts are flat or shrinking.
