‘Tis the season for school closures
16th December 2024 · 0 Comments
By Marta Jewson
The Lens
Because of the city’s all-charter school system, school closures have become one of the city’s ongoing winter traditions. This week, students, families and staff at four New Orleans charters were anxiously awaiting word on whether their schools will remain open beyond May.
This year’s closures are complicated by a surprise budget shortfall and declining enrollment.
Enrollment has steadily fallen over the last decade, leaving empty seats and strained budgets at under-enrolled schools across the city. There’s no way to resolve this problem without shuttering or merging some city schools, school officials have said.
The growing budget shortfall for the district is also at the top of officials’ minds.
The projected budget gap started at $20 million and rose last month to $36 million. This week, officials warned it could top $49 million.
While hired accountants are scouring the district’s books to get to the bottom of the budget shortfall, top district staff is focused on charter contracts – with renewals for schools with passing grades and closures for those with failing grades.
Charter contracts are typically issued for three, five or seven years, depending on how well a school performs. The state-issued A-F letter grade released in November factor heavily in the renewal decisions. Then, in early December, the Orleans Parish School Board meets to vote on the fate of each school.
This year, two schools – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School and Noble Minds Institute – are the ones to watch, after they received received D and F letter grades, respectively, from the state last month.
Another closure, of Delores T. Arthur School for Young Men, is not linked to contract renewals but to precarious finances. On Monday night, the Delores T. Arthur board voted to hand in its charter midyear. Founder Byron Arthur said the 98-student school was staring at an $800,000 budget deficit come June.
“We love these young men,” he said on Tuesday morning. “We had to think about what’s the best thing for our students.”
Earlier this month, a state-run charter school, International High School of New Orleans, also voted to close at the end of the school year in May.
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These shifts are not unusual — school shutdowns and voluntary closures happen nearly every year. The process follows a core tenet of the charter movement: charter schools that fail must close – usually at the end of the year.
But, as New Orleans has learned, school closures are rarely simple. The process stresses and strains students, teachers, and families, who must decide whether to stick out the school year in a doomed school or move on to a slightly better school where they may not know anyone.
Also earlier this month, in a phone call with King administrators, NOLA Public Schools district officials said they would recommend that the board close the school’s high school and while keeping open its original pre-k to 8th-grade school at Fats Domino and North Claiborne. That move sends roughly 185 high schoolers to new schools in the fall, while maintaining stability for the roughly 550 students on King’s elementary campus.
Before the district’s enrollment declined, the charters for closed schools were typically handed off to another charter, which would come in to try and “turn around” the school. But not with the same student body; students from closing schools are often scattered among other charters.
This spring’s closure of King High School will send 185 high school students back into the system, to fill empty seats at other high schools across town.
On this past Thursday, the Orleans Parish School Board made the King and Delores T. Arthur closures official. The district has also recommended that the board officially award new charter contracts to the following schools:
Elementary: Bricolage Academy, Einstein Charter at Sherwood Forest, Elan Academy, Esperanza Charter School, Fannie C. Williams Charter School, Foundation Prep, Harriet Tubman Charter School, and Wilson Charter School.
High School: G.W. Carver High School, John F. Kennedy High School, New Orleans Accelerated High School, The NET: Central City
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Closing campuses, changing communities
King School has faced challenges over the years, including a longstanding non-compliance order for special education services, facility problems and allegations of nepotism. But for years, its lower-school campus was a district powerhouse, earning B grades. In the Lower 9th Ward, many residents hail King as a bedrock of the community.
Though King school was flooded past its first floor in 2005, taking in 20 feet of water when the levees broke as Hurricane Katrina approached, the school’s longtime leader, Doris Hicks, fought the school board to bring student volunteers from Common Ground into the building to clean it, then pushed again to get it re-opened it in 2007.
With high school options lacking citywide, and even more acutely in the Lower 9, Hicks responded to neighborhood requests, adding a grade a year – starting with grade 9, then 10, 11, and 12 – to the lower-school campus, housed in trailers. Nearly a decade ago, King High School moved about 10 blocks away, into a brand-new structure built on the campus of the former Alfred Lawless high school.
In 2015, King was the first “recovery” school to move to the control of the Orleans Parish School Board, from under the auspices of the state-run Recovery School District. It did so after a disagreement with the Recovery School District, showing another competitive aspect of the “free market” charter system, as the elected local school board yearned for schools to return.
But with the expanded high school, the school’s academic grades began sliding. In 2021, King was one of the first schools to receive a “conditional” renewal, a three-year contract that the district introduced during the pandemic. Then last year, with slipping scores, the state gave King School an F as its School Performance School score, putting a target on its back.
Last month, as the state released its 2024 School Performance Schools, King earned a slightly higher grade, a D. Apparently, that was not enough to keep King in charge of both the high school and the elementary school.
Over at Noble Minds, founder Vera Triplett built her school on a therapeutic approach to education through BESE, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which holds the charter to Noble Minds, like the Orleans Public School Board holds the charter for King.
Noble Minds offers students social-emotional classes that teaches them how to express and manage their feelings in a healthy, controlled way. Parents have also praised the school’s programming. But the small 150-student school didn’t make the grade, earning an F in its state-issued School Performance Score last month and a BESE recommendation for closure in May. The decision will likely be finalized at BESE’s this week’s meeting, on Wednesday (Dec. 18).
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Decentralized districts complicates matters
In 2021, amid declining enrollment, district officials announced that the city had too many empty seats. It had approved more charter schools to operate more grades than needed, due in part to enrollment projects. They called for a “right-sizing” plan that included charter-school closures and consolidations.
Though district enrollment rose by 100 students this year, the long-term enrollment declines – mirroring nationwide population changes – are significant enough that closures will still be necessary.
Across New Orleans in 2022, there were 3,000 empty seats in district schools.
But the most efficient school district runs with every building filled to capacity.
That’s because every school’s budget includes operating costs for its building. But it must have enough students to offset those costs, because schools in Louisiana are funded based on enrollment, on a per-pupil basis. When schools are under-enrolled, their building operating costs stay the same, but their revenue goes down, because they have fewer students and thus less per-pupil funding.
To make the New Orleans district more efficient, the district must shutter some schools – and not reopen them.
But those closures are more difficult in a decentralized district like New Orleans’, experts say. The city’s entire public school layout is based on existing charter contracts, which are renewed based on school performance — not the number of schools needed to enroll the city’s students, experts say.
The decentralized system creates unique challenges, says seasoned schools economist Doug Harris.
“For New Orleans, the ‘right-sizing’ question is easier here and harder here. It’s easier in the sense that you have a system built for closing low-performing schools,” he said. “But the contracts don’t come due when you may need to be lowering the enrollment.”
Basically, he explained, the district’s charter contracts evaluate academic, operational and financial performance of a charter school — not the enrollment of the city. “They have a performance framework. The most straightforward thing to do is make a decision based on that,” he said. “If everyone is meeting the benchmarks, then it (school closure) becomes tougher.”
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Failing schools are typically closed when their contracts are up. But some failing schools, like King High School, are in brand-new buildings that the district would like to keep open. So it is difficult for the district to pair strength in buildings with academic strength.
“The board is having to make decisions about closing a school now based on other schools later,” Harris said. “With a regular district you could make all the decisions at once.”
Some charter-management groups that run multiple schools have taken it upon themselves to close and merge schools within their organizations.
Crescent City Schools took over Mildred Osborne in 2023. ARISE Schools, which operated Osborne, gave up its charter and Crescent City Schools took over the campus, merging its students from Akili Academy. InspireNOLA combined two of its schools and Firstline Schools did the same. But these types of closures and mergers take the public out of the equation.
CEO Kate Mehok said her network is “acutely aware of the changing enrollment patterns in the city.”
“One of the reasons we chose to merge Akili Academy and Osborne Charter School in Fall 2023 was to address this issue. And in doing so we took 500 seats off-line and opened up a building to a high school that needed a permanent home,” she said, referring to Morris Jeff, which moved its high school into the Akili building.
District officials say mergers like that are needed to address tight budgets. But voluntary mergers and closures can only go so far.
Budget problems could grow
The enrollment inefficiencies are rising to the fore now, as school leaders brace for a potential $49 million shortfall.
“The budget issue would not be as bad if we were fully enrolled in our schools. We have too many empty seats in the city,” said Sabrina Pence, CEO of FirstLine Schools. “It is a compounding issue.”
In the fall quarter of the 2024-25 school year, school leaders were met with a disastrous reality — the district’s financial forecast was based on the wrong amount of sales and property taxes it expected to receive from the city.
The district’s spring forecast is the basis for the budget for every charter-school budget in the city. Unless and until the board approves funding assistance, all charter schools in the city will be faced with making substantial, swift cuts to balance budgets by the end of the 2024-25 budget year.
Last month, the school board partially filled that gap – by dismissing a years-old lawsuit against the city of New Orleans for an immediate $20 million in cash, along with $70 million in future funding guarantees.
But it’s unclear how quickly — and in what fashion — that money will flow to schools. District officials and board members have mentioned both direct cash assistance and loans as options.
Other potential funds are lingering in the wings. A new law requires the city to share its school-zone ticket revenue with the school board.
To date, the two agencies have not agreed on how the money should be divvied up. Until that agreement is reached, the school-zone ticket money is accumulating in a City Hall account.
This article originally published in the December 16, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
Tags: Charter schools, Delores T. Arthur School for Young Men, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter, International High School of New Orleans, Noble Minds Institute, Orleans Parish School Board, school closures
