Eagle Academy Board votes to close school
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Anonymous
This is on the charter school board. This should have been finalized in May or June so parents had time to find care or a new school for their kids. PK3 and 4 is tough to find spots, and some parents dont want to drive all over the city if they can find a spot. I just find this whole situation infuriating. |
Anonymous
| PCSB is useless....They are the ones that need a full audit and review! |
Anonymous
+1 I am PP and totally agree. Why fund this board if they don’t actually oversee schools and support families? |
Anonymous
It's also a scramble for the neighborhood schools that Eagle's K-3 students are in bounds for. Over 10 K students unexpectedly enrolled at our DCPS just this week. I don't know enough to say how that's really impacting anything beyond class sizes, but seems likely to be logistically and financially tough on admin and teachers. But I guess that's not the charter board's problem ... |
Anonymous
Indeed. DCPS is ultimately having to deal with a lot of this fallout. But charter boosters will continue to complain about DCPS anyway! |
Anonymous
| This is such a horrible failure by the PCSB. They should be ashamed of themselves. They were asleep at the wheel and what could have been a sad but orderly transition became a nightmare. What a horrible thing to do to all of those families, especially the PK kids and parents who have no by-right option. I cannot even imagine the stress of losing school at this point in the year. FOR SHAME. |
Anonymous
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/08/24/eagle-academy-dc-closure-new-school-search/
"there were some signs of trouble — brief interruptions in health insurance coverage, late paychecks and two rounds of layoffs in December and June." It enrages me that these blatant red flags were ignored. I guess the December layoffs might have been a good thing in light of declining enrollment, but late paychecks? Come on. How much public money was wasted on enabling this train wreck? PCSB was asleep at the switch. |
Anonymous
| I agree with all posters above. I hope the city does a review/audit of the charter board. It’s really awful how they handled this. Now you have teachers out of jobs with very little time to find new ones, kids without schooling options, families scrambling and potentially overcrowded DCPS classes in these neighborhoods who have to absorb these kids. When people say DCPS is a mess they never admit that DCPS is always the organization that has to clean up after a mess like this. |
Anonymous
| This is just so sad. I saw on one of the TV news clips that Mendelson sent a letter to the PCSB, does anyone know where I can find it? It seems 100% clear that they ignored red flags for a very long time. |
Anonymous
| See all the issues and complaints over the years involving LAMB, SSMA, etc. The PCSB did nothing. All leadership should be fired at the minimum! |
Anonymous
In 2022-23 there were only five DCPS schools that had even 20 kids from their boundary attending an Eagle campus (Hendley, Simon, Malcolm X, Turner, and Van Ness), and that covered 6 grades (PK3-3). So it seems unlikely that 10 Eagle kindergartners had in-bound rights at any DCPS school. I am not doubting that a DCPS school had 10 kindergartners enroll this week, but they probably weren't all from Eagle. |
Anonymous
Make that 7 schools--Garfield and King also had 20 or more 22-3. But with enrollment dropping at Eagle since then, I doubt there is a DCPS school that had 10 kids from Eagle in the same grade living in-bounds. |
Anonymous
| I honestly don’t have strong opinions on the charter model as policy over all, but according to the theory, this is what’s SUPPOSED to happen. The authorizing board is supposed go approve a bunch of schools and close the ones that don’t perform. The intention was never really to “support” them. That’s what school districts do. Charters are supposed to sink or swim. The timing sucks but I think a purist would say that that’s on the school, not the board. The board has to wait for them to be insolvent or whatever the conditions are to close it. They can’t declare it dead when it’s not quite dead yet. |
Anonymous
Come on that's insane. It's not supposed to be sink or swim. It's supposed to be that warning signs and poor financial data means being put on a corrective action plan. Which the PCSB has the right to do, but failed to do until very late in the process. The PCSB does not have to wait for the conditions to be unfixable. It can, should, and does intervene. It just missed the boat on this one. |