Last week, I mentioned that Concrete Roses STEM Academy, a charter school in my hometown of Charlotte, abruptly closed its doors just 20 days into its first year. On Thursday, Concrete Roses’ founder broke his silence, saying that his school had been short on cash from the start.
The school’s founder, Cedric Stone, spoke with WBTV in Charlotte in the first interview granted by anyone affiliated with the school since it shut down for the final time last Friday. Stone gave up his post as chairman of the business department at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina to set up Charlotte’s first STEM magnet school–meaning it would be heavily focused on science, technology, engineering and math. He hoped to use the new charter school to give a hand up to disadvantaged kids. He’d been there before; he’d been an at-risk student in Cincinnati.
However, when the time came to pay fees and put together marketing material, Stone said he “didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” He had to pull $40,000 out of his 401(k) fund to invest in school operations. Stone openly admitted that if he had the chance to do it all over again, he’d have raised seed money beforehand. Stone also said that he didn’t have nearly enough manpower to spread the word about Concrete Roses. As a result, while his initial projections called for an enrollment of 300 students in grades K-12, the school only opened with 126 students–a number that dwindled even further when parents began pulling their kids out only two weeks into the year. It was probably just as well; he didn’t have enough money to buy a bigger building than the location he eventually found in southeast Charlotte. Original plans called for a mobile classroom that would have housed more students, but the approval process was still underway by the time the school opened in August.
Last Wednesday, the state Office of Charter Schools froze Concrete Roses’ access to state funding due to serious irregularities. The school’s board held an emergency meeting that night and decided to surrender the charter. Stone said that while there was enough money to keep the school open until October, he and the rest of the board felt “it would have been selfish” to keep the school open until then, given the circumstances.
There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered. For one thing, according to the letter from the state announcing the freezing of funds, Concrete Roses hadn’t submitted expense reports for July and August. It had also drawn 59 percent of its total allotment of state money, even though it fell well short of its enrollment projections. Additionally, according to The Charlotte Observer, several students came home without books or homework, and there were reports that the curriculum wasn’t ready. The school’s initial plans had been wildly optimistic, to say the least; it called for 4,000 students within 10 years. Regrettably, it doesn’t look like WBTV education reporter Dedrick Russell pressed him on either of these details. It’s too bad. The parents of those kids deserve answers for why they had to look for a new school less than a month into the year.
As it stands now, it looks like Stone and his colleagues were simply in over their heads. Sadly, that’s the best-case scenario based on what is known so far. Stay tuned.
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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.
