AURORA | Aurora charter school High Point Academy was renewed for another three-year charter by the Colorado Charter School Institute.
High Point Academy was established in 2006 and serves roughly 700 prekindergarten through 8th grade students in the Aurora, Brighton and northeast Denver region.
The institute’s board of directors renewed the charter school for another three years with the possibility of a two-year extension after that at a Dec. 15 meeting, according to a news release from the institute. The extension will depend on whether the charter meets certain academic benchmarks.
The institute adjusted its renewal and accreditation process this year because of COVID-19, and drew on academic data from 2014-2015 through 2018-2019 because state assessments were not conducted in the spring of 2020.
School site visits, another part of the review, were conducted virtually this fall.
Terry Croy Lewis, executive director of the Charter School Institute, said it is unclear whether assessments will be conducted this spring or not.
“I think there is a lot of fear that if the state were to administer the assessment it could be used for accountability in ways that are unfair to the school,” Lewis said.
She is sympathetic to that concern but said she believes that the state needs to have a way to measure how students are being affected academically by the pandemic.
“It’s important to know how students are doing,” she said.