A version of this article originally appeared in WFAE reporter Ann Doss Helms' weekly education newsletter. It has been updated with information from Monday’s Charter Schools Review Board meeting. To get the latest school news in your inbox first, sign up for our email newsletters here.
Two North Carolina charter schools fighting for survival have focused a spotlight on the importance of the volunteers who run the state’s 210 independent public schools.
Unlike traditional school board members, charter school board members are not elected and can’t, by law, be paid. Instead they’re often recruited by school founders or, as the years pass, by previous board members.
Those charter school board members carry huge responsibility: More than 145,000 students attend charter schools, and the state spent $986 million on charter schools last year. Then there’s county tax money that follows students into charter schools. Mecklenburg County alone, which accounted for about 19% of the state’s charter-school students, passed along $89 million.
And when charter schools run into problems, the volunteers can find themselves hard-pressed to summon the time and expertise to solve them. It’s not uncommon to see board members resign when the going gets rough.
Last week three out of five board members from Gastonia’s Ridgeview Charter School went to Raleigh to ask for more time to turn around dismal academic performance.
Board Chair Colleen Samuels, a lawyer who has served on the board since Ridgeview opened in 2019, said the other two couldn’t break away.
“We have one who’s a firefighter. He just started a new job,” she said.
State officials say Samuels was the only board member who showed up for previous review meetings in Raleigh, in November and January. Samuels said last week that “this is something that the state charter board did not quite understand, that it is difficult to a) recruit members for a volunteer board, and b) to get board members who are able to pivot, and to show up when we need to be.”
Actually, they almost certainly do understand. Members of the Charter School Review Board — which voted unanimously to close the school — are mostly current or former charter school operators.
The vision for Ridgeview
Charter schools often start with the vision of one or more founders. In this case, Reshall Williams and her late husband decided to create Ridgeview Charter School in an impoverished, historically Black neighborhood after the husband’s job brought the couple to Gastonia.
“My husband’s position was to turn around a large manufacturing company there,” Williams told the state Board of Education during last week’s appeal. She said he discovered that many employees were illiterate, which made them unqualified for skilled manufacturing jobs.
Williams said she brought 10 years of charter school experience from other states and decided to launch Ridgeview. Samuels, the current board chair, was one of the first people she recruited for support and oversight.
“When Principal Williams walked into my church and said she had this dream … I was immediately hooked,” Samuels told the appeals team. “I firmly believe that education is the key to our students achieving and being an integral part of our ever-changing society.”
Samuels told the board her legal expertise has helped keep Ridgeview out of financial and regulatory trouble. But she admitted the board is guilty of “terrible record-keeping” and is still learning how to govern. About a year ago, Samuels said, two board members resigned unexpectedly and “we had to scramble to recruit new board members.”
“I have never sat on a nonprofit board before,” Samuels said. “So I am learning as we go along.”
People who run a charter school have to master not only academic leadership but all the support functions that are handled by dozens of administrators in large school districts. Samuels and Williams talked about trying to build a foundation for struggling students while scrambling to keep the doors open.
At last week’s appeal to the state Board of Education, Williams and Samuels laid out detailed plans to work with new consultants, improve lessons and help the board govern better. But officials said it was too late. They were unwilling to risk letting students keep failing while Ridgeview figured things out.
A more complex struggle in Kinston
Meanwhile, state officials have spent the last few months sorting through an even deeper tangle of board problems at Children’s Village Academy, a K-8 school in Kinston. It’s been around since 1997. State charter officials have documented a host of recent problems (find the reports here). Those include federal grant money used for unauthorized purposes, poorly documented loans from a board member to the school, inadequate records of board meetings and failure to disclose conflicts of interest.
Two weeks ago, the Children’s Village board agreed to repay $152,000 in federal grant money used for contracts and salaries that didn’t comply with the grant’s terms. The school can’t use state or federal money, so the money will have to come from Lenoir County taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the charter review board heard Monday that Children’s Village is running a $3,000 deficit, and losing students, which made financial recovery look almost impossible.
Board members repeatedly questioned the school’s viability. “Their track record is just really poor,” said John Eldridge, who runs a Chatham County charter school. “It’d be worth fighting for, for me, if they had shown that this was like a hiccup in the road. But this has been a saga.”
“I still think that we have some outstanding questions around conflict of interest,” said Todd Godbey, a Wilmington charter school CEO.
It might seem like this would have been a slam-dunk for closure, especially given that no one from Children’s Village logged on to the remote meeting, and that the school is on the state’s continually low-performing charter school list. But the board decided to wait until the May meeting to decide, giving the board one more chance to show up and explain how it plans to get the school on track.
An evolving oversight system
North Carolina’s current system for overseeing charter schools took shape after the General Assembly lifted the 100-school cap in 2011, leading to a surge of new schools.
The early years were messy. The charter boom was concentrated in the Charlotte region. Some schools flourished, but a few crashed. Charlotte saw one school close in April 2014 as its finances fell apart, leaving students to find new schools with only a few weeks left in the school year. By January 2015 another school was failing, with $14 in its bank account as debts rose and enrollment dwindled.
Over the years, state officials got more rigorous in screening applicants, and created a “ready to open” process with multiple checkpoints between approval of a plan and opening of school doors. Charter Schools Director Ashley Baquero says part of that process is trying to ensure that board members understand the complexity of the work ahead.
Instead of waiting 10 years for a first in-depth charter renewal review, schools like Ridgeview now have to report back in five years. That was a tough break for schools that opened in 2019 and plunged right into COVID-19. But as officials noted, other schools in the same boat qualified for renewal.
It’s interesting to note that the people who insisted on closing Ridgeview are not anti-charter activists, but supporters of the system who have concluded that weak schools hurt the whole program. It’s also interesting to see this crackdown playing out while Republican leaders in the General Assembly embrace the notion that parent choice is the ultimate form of accountability — at least when it comes to providing Opportunity Scholarships to help pay private school tuition. Under that line of reasoning, it wouldn’t matter how bad a school’s academic performance is, as long as parents are willing to enroll their kids.
