AURORA | After several months of bumpy negotiations, the Cherry Creek School District is once again on track to add a new charter school.
The CCSD Board of Education Monday, Feb. 8, conditionally approved Heritage Heights Academy to join the district in the 2016-17 school year, reopening the door for the district to add its first new charter school in nearly 20 years.
“We are so grateful for all the time and effort that CCSD Board of Education, and the CCSD District Accountability Committee gave to our application,” Jen Gibbons, a co-founder of Heritage Heights, wrote in an email.
The CCSD board’s recent decision temporarily quells a simmering spat between the school, the district and the state board of education. In October, the CCSD board voted to deny Heritage Heights’ original charter application, citing concerns with many of the school’s proposals, including several with its Florida-based management company, Academica. The school then appealed the district’s decision to the state board of education, which resulted in the state board remanding the application back to CCSD for reconsideration — a decision the officials from the Aurora-based district largely rebuked.
“We were very disillusioned in (the) state board’s decision to approve a charter school application that even some of them considered troubling,” Dr. Harry Bull, superintendent of CCSD, said in a statement. “It showed a complete disregard for the right of locally elected school boards to determine what is in the best interest of their own communities.”
The state board voted 5-2 in favor of remanding the Heritage Heights application and declared that CCSD’s decision to deny the school’s original proposal “was contrary to the best interest of the pupils, the school district, or community,” according to a January news release issued by the Department of Education.
Despite receiving tentative approval from CCSD earlier this week, Heritage Heights still faces several hurdles before it can open its doors to students this summer. The CCSD board outlined a multitude of issues that Heritage Heights still needs to address. Among the six supplemental requirements mentioned in the CCSD resolution: Fine-tune a curriculum for students with specialized needs, provide more details on the school’s proposed facility, provide evidence that there is a need for a new school in the area around the facility, bolster the school’s evaluation procedures and contract with Academica, and improve the school’s bylaws.
“We still have a great deal of concern about some aspects of the contract,” said Tustin Amole, spokeswoman for CCSD.
The bulk of the new stipulations relate to the school’s proposed facility and its ongoing contract with Academica.
The school is tentatively planning on opening in the basement of Edge Church on East Smoky Hill Road — a location that has made district officials wary.
“It’s in the basement of church, so we have to make sure it’s up to code, there’s a safety plan in place, and it’s equivalent to all of our other facilities,” Amole said. “And it’s in a whole different area of the district than they had originally planned. What we need to know from them is if the people who were interested when it was elsewhere are still interested.”
Gibbons said that Heritage Heights has received interest from 262 families as of Feb. 11. She said that equates to roughly 500 potential students.
The CCSD resolution also calls for a tighter, more transparent contract with Academica that would prevent the company from having access to student records, require competitive bidding for purchasing and allow a unilateral termination of the contract with the company.
In its resolution for denying Heritage Heights’ application last year, the CCSD board referenced several concerns regarding Academica’s checkered financial history.
The company operates more than 100 charter schools across the country — primarily in Florida but also in Utah, California and other states — and has been criticized in recent years for its business dealings. According to a Miami Herald investigation in 2011, the for-profit company pulled in more than $158 million in annual revenue.
Academica has also been criticized for having conflict of interests with people close to the company serving on boards for individual charters, as well as for lucrative real estate dealings in south Florida. Those issues resulted in a federal investigation into Academica’s practices.
Heritage Heights has 90 days to comply with the district’s specific conditions. Gibbons said that she finds the district’s additional requests reasonable and that Heritage Heights will acquiesce to the new stipulations.
“We found the conditions fair and we will make every effort to satisfy them,” she said. “We plan to comply with all the conditions set by CCSD. We expect them to accept our application.”
If the CCSD board once again rejects the Heritage Heights application, however, the school retains the right to re-appeal to the state board of education. That’s an option that the school district views as highly unfavorable, according to Amole.
Amole said that should CCSD again find the proposed school’s application inadequate, the school could pursue joining the Charter School Institute, which is a state-run coalition of charter schools. Approval by the state board and CSI would strip CCSD of its authority to authorize any future charter schools, which is a right the district does not want to lose, according to Amole.
“We are really hoping that we can reach an amicable agreement,” she said. “The goal here is just to ensure that the students who attend Heritage Heights Academy have a high quality experience equal to that of our neighborhood schools.”
Currently, Cherry Creek Academy is the lone charter school operating within CCSD. There have only been two other proposals made by charter schools vying to join the district since CCA was approved in the mid-1990s, but both charter applications were denied by the CCSD board. The decisions were later upheld by the state board, according to Amole.
Amole said that the lack of charter applications speaks to the quality of the education provided by the district.
“I think the lack of applications over time shows a great deal of satisfaction with our neighborhood schools and that they’re providing quality education.”
However, Heritage Heights has bemoaned the lack of charter options for students in CCSD, citing that CCA’s wait list currently boasts about 3,300 students. The school only enrolls about 570 students at any given time.