On Thursday morning, parents of students at a charter school in my hometown of Charlotte got an unpleasant surprise. Their school will shut its doors at the end of the week due to massive financial problems–just 20 days after it opened.
When Concrete Roses STEM Academy opened in August, it had a lot of promise. Located in southeast Charlotte, it touted itself as the city’s first “STEM” charter–meaning it was focused on science, technology, engineering, and math. According to its Website, the school took its name from the concept of growing roses out of concrete–a “phenomenal act” it intended to make a normal occurrence by setting high expectations for student achievement in a nurturing environment. It promised to offer a welter of opportunities to its students, including an enrichment program, internships, and athletics. The school’s chairman, Cedric Stone, rose from being an at-risk student in Cincinnati to chairman of the business department at Benedict College, a historically black college in Columbia, South Carolina. Before then, according to his LinkedIn profile, he’d worked at Honda and Ford. He decided to help set up the school as part of his dream of dedicating his life to helping other disadvantaged kids get a leg up.
However, that promise came unraveled in the space of only 36 hours on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday, the state’s Office of Charter Schools placed Concrete Roses on financial disciplinary status. WFAE, Charlotte’s NPR member station, obtained a copy of the letter. Read it here. Apparently Concrete Roses had failed to file Uniform Education Reporting System reports for July and August. Those reports are the financial statements that charter schools use to justify the use of state money. The director of the Office of Charter Schools, Joel Medley, said that those reports are a requirement of the charter agreement. Additionally, Concrete Roses was allowed access to $479,084 in state funds, based on a projected enrollment of 300 students in in grades K-12. However, only 126 students actually enrolled–not even half the original projection. According to state figures, Concrete Roses had withdrawn $285,170 in state funds–which was not only 42 percent more than it should have withdrawn with its smaller-than-expected enrollment, but was more than 59 percent of its original state allotment. As a result, the state froze Concrete Roses’ access to state money.
Shirley Brooks, the parent of a fourth-grader at Concrete Roses, told WFAE that later on Wednesday, she and other parents got voicemails and emails about an emergency board meeting to take place that night. At that meeting, the board voted to surrender the school’s charter and close its doors on Friday afternoon. Brooks was dumbfounded, saying she’d never heard of this happening at a school before.
According to The Charlotte Observer, the school was fraught with problems from the start. It originally planned to have 2,400 students within 10 years–a projection that some members of the state charter school advisory board found unrealistic. The school initially didn’t have a budget for maintenance, and didn’t budget for athletics even though it had a line item for an athletic director. Amid these concerns, the charter was narrowly approved. One parent, Tiffany Esber, said that students frequently came home with no books or homework, and had also heard reports the curriculum wasn’t ready. She finally got fed up and pulled her kids out on Monday, though some parents had begun withdrawing their kids as early as two weeks into the year. The Observer reports that Stone was due to get $95,000; there’s no word on how much of that money he’s already received.
I’m still in the process of learning about charter schools and how they work. But I know enough to know that when a school can’t survive through the first semester, let alone the first month, something is wrong–very wrong. In the end, the real victims are the kids, who now find themselves having to find a new school after only a month. For now, the board isn’t talking to anyone. Its Facebook page hasn’t been updated since July, and its Twitter feed has been silent since last October. It’s too bad–the parents of those kids deserve answers. Hopefully they’ll get them sooner than later.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC at Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
