New Hope Academy Charter School in York, PA, is making a final stand before closing its doors on Tuesday. The highly popular, high-performing school has been embroiled in a fight with the York City School District for years, culminating in a legal dispute that involved the State Charter Appeal Board. New Hope’s charter was revoked due to alleged academic failures, unethical financial practices, and other violations.
It seems, however, that the York City School Board was set on closing the school before these allegations were even raised. After all, bringing the over 700 middle and high school students back into traditional public schools translates into more money for the school district.
That’s right – in court documents recently released, the New Hope charter revocation process was a sham, the closure of the school was a foregone conclusion, and more than one million dollars in taxpayer money was used to hire attorneys solely to exact revenge and return tuition payment monies to a district in financial ruin. Members of the York City School Board said that they were told they could not publicly reveal that the proceedings were only to recover monies for the District.
Ironically, the York City District will completely convert to a system with external charter operators for the 2015-16 school year if it doesn’t reach a balanced budget by the end of June. With teacher contract negotiations going nowhere as the clock ticks, and a deficit valued at almost $5 million dollars, the York City School District may end up receiving a lesson in futility for closing a charter school for the sole purpose of recouping money for itself.
This financially motivated attack against the New Hope Academy Charter School is just one manifestation of both the incompetence and the vindictiveness of the school board. Affidavits reveal that the board did not perform annual reviews of the charter school, giving the board no leg to stand on in revocation proceedings.
At a school board meeting in March, one board member silenced New Hope supporters (including students!) from speaking in support of their school, using the rationale that she was only responsible “to the taxpayers.” You really can’t make this stuff up.
In this education policy environment, there are plenty of calls for more oversight of charter schools. What we really need, as is proven by the York City School District, is quality charter school authorizers.
State and local boards inside the traditional K-12 system are not ideal for supporting great charter school options for parents and families. In fact, they actively try to stifle such options in their seedy tactics, aggressively trying to find ways to keep money in their pockets at the expense of student and parent choice. Pennsylvania’s charter law gives the right to the citizens of the state to have choice over their public education. York City School Board thinks its own checkbook is more important.