Eagle Academy Board votes to close school

[Anonymous]

I went back and watched that meeting. PCSB took no responsibility for this avoidable mess of their own creation. They dragged Eagle through the mud. Fair enough - they failed. But who is going to take it to PCSB for failing at their job?

At every turn the PCSB board identified the worst possible decision and went with that.

[Anonymous]

The school has had issues for years. Former ED was shopping/gambling addict who stole money from school. School needed to close.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The school has had issues for years. Former ED was shopping/gambling addict who stole money from school. School needed to close.

Then the PCSB should have directed the school to wind up operations starting last winter, and it should not have accepted lottery applications this past cycle.

That is the only sane way to close a DC charter school. The PCSB really needs to provide enough oversight/support to ensure that schools can be wound up like that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

I was swimming in the pro-charter policy waters 20 years ago when this all was catching on, and I think you’re wrong. That’s probably what it has become, but that wasn’t the concept.

Well, that was 20 years ago. In the present, the PCSB has various ways to intervene, and they failed to use them.

DP. Obviously the best intervention would have been to close the school before the school year started, before the lottery. But the school wasn't insolvent then, do closing it would not have been the right thing to do at that time.

People view charter schools in DC as regular public schools, as another branch of DCPS. But they aren't.

this was all predictable but so many idiots citizens voting for charter loving politicians. i blame the mayor in part, she is part of this lineage. if you werent living here 15/20 yrs ago you dont know. the entire concept is dumb and inefficient

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

They missed payroll, lapsed insurance coverage, missed mortgage/rent payments and missed PCSB-required financial targets. At what point, in your opinion, would it be appropriate for the school to be closed by the authorizer? Instead, after years of missing PCSB-required targets and with payroll and insurance issues before the end of the last school year, they were put on a plan this summer that they were unlikely to be able to meet even when the plan was drafted.

[Anonymous]

What other charters have serious financial issues? Is it all a black box?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What other charters have serious financial issues? Is it all a black box?

You can look at the FAR reports. https://dcpcsb.org/financial-analysis-reports You can skim through for debt ratio and days of cash on hand, which are good, easy to read metrics. And sometimes the board meeting minutes of the schools. It's really appalling how some schools just ignore the requirement to post minutes, or whose minutes reveal basically nothing, though.

But there's always the question of whether the information is being truthfully reported to the board of each school and to the PCSB, which seems to have been an issue with Eagle.

It seems like a lot of charters fail in their first few years or at their 5-year renewal. But there was also the Amos scandal in 2015, and the failure of Washington Mathematics Science and Technology, which was the sad fall of a 20-year school due to getting upside down on a mortgage. I wonder if the PCSB tends to give schools with a long track record the benefit of the doubt, which is a mistake in the case of Eagle and WMS&T.

[Anonymous]

If you skim Exhibit 5 of the FAR, you can see Days of Cash on Hand, Net Assets/Deficit, and other things. Low cash on hand schools in the 2022 FAR are: Capital Village (55), Digital Pioneers (19), Global Citizens (23), Ingenuity Prep (52), Lee (56), Rocketship (48 and a deficit!). Rocketship actually has had a deficit for years-- must be propped up by the parent organization? Exhibit 8 shows operating losses which is also interesting.

Exhibit 11 shows the expense distribution-- I think outlier stats in personnel or occupancy would be a potential reason for concern, although some schools do have a personnel-heavy model or a lot of students with 1:1s. Hope Community PCS, for example, has a huge occupancy cost even though they're located in Edgewood which isn't that expensive.

And obviously a decline in enrollment is a huge red flag if there's no explanation for it.

The 2023 FAR should be out in the next month or two. Some of the less strong schools are up for charter review, so we'll see.

[Anonymous]

I have worked at a charter school (in another city). I find in general that they are not well run from the business side of things. Often times the head of school has no knowledge of the true financials behind a school and I find they don’t always get the best financial planners for COO or business manager. It is a flawed system. DCPS is propped up for central office and the city government so principals aren’t paying mortgages or rents or able to spend more money than they have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have worked at a charter school (in another city). I find in general that they are not well run from the business side of things. Often times the head of school has no knowledge of the true financials behind a school and I find they don’t always get the best financial planners for COO or business manager. It is a flawed system. DCPS is propped up for central office and the city government so principals aren’t paying mortgages or rents or able to spend more money than they have.

Yup. It's basically empowering people to make real estate decisions and money management decisions when they have no expertise in doing that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What other charters have serious financial issues? Is it all a black box?

Years ago, DS attended Two Rivers Young. I heard whispers that the financial picture was murky and they were highly leveraged.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What other charters have serious financial issues? Is it all a black box?

You can look at the FAR reports. https://dcpcsb.org/financial-analysis-reports You can skim through for debt ratio and days of cash on hand, which are good, easy to read metrics. And sometimes the board meeting minutes of the schools. It's really appalling how some schools just ignore the requirement to post minutes, or whose minutes reveal basically nothing, though.

But there's always the question of whether the information is being truthfully reported to the board of each school and to the PCSB, which seems to have been an issue with Eagle.

It seems like a lot of charters fail in their first few years or at their 5-year renewal. But there was also the Amos scandal in 2015, and the failure of Washington Mathematics Science and Technology, which was the sad fall of a 20-year school due to getting upside down on a mortgage. I wonder if the PCSB tends to give schools with a long track record the benefit of the doubt, which is a mistake in the case of Eagle and WMS&T.

Old articles on WMST show that it isn't the PCSB giving older schools the benefit of the doubt, it's the PCSB not acting on known financial issues and not doing appropriate analysis of all the financial data that they already have from each school.

City Paper -- "The DC Public Charter School Board Knew One of D.C.’s Oldest Charters Was Financially Troubled and Didn’t Intervene"
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/186259/the-dc-public-charter-school-board-didnt-intervene-in-a-financially-troubled-school/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have worked at a charter school (in another city). I find in general that they are not well run from the business side of things. Often times the head of school has no knowledge of the true financials behind a school and I find they don’t always get the best financial planners for COO or business manager. It is a flawed system. DCPS is propped up for central office and the city government so principals aren’t paying mortgages or rents or able to spend more money than they have.

DCPS may be better managed (though many posts on this board suggest there is significant variability in management across all kinds of schools - DCPS and charter). The bigger benefit, IMO, is that when there is overspending like 80 million dollar school renovations that cost over 100 million, it doesn’t affect DCPSs viability. There’s a charter board that established rules like how much days cash charters should have at a minimum among other financial targets. Supposedly these rules are in place to ensure good financial management and, hopefully, to protect students and families and school staff from the fallout from bad management. If the PCSB isn’t even doing a basic level of oversight on finances then the “bad management” problem is much bigger than any single charter school.

[Anonymous]

https://chairmanmendelson.com/2024/09/10/public-charter-school-board-response-re-eagle-academy/

Here is the PCSB's response to Mendelson's letter. So basically they were aware of problems in 2019, but then in 2021 stopped monitoring-- even though enrollment continued to drastically decline. The finances maybe seemed okay due to COVID funds but were not actually okay, is my suspicion. So then in 2022 PCSB resumed monitoring, as enrollment declined even more. But even though things continued to get worse in 2023, the PCSB did not require a Corrective Action Plan. It was only upon receiving the audited financial statements in January 2024 that the deficiencies in internal controls were identified. The CEO was removed, and Eagle;s Board oversight was revealed to be sorely lacking. In the end, an unexpected grant shortfall of $149,000 put them over the edge. There was still hope that the acquisition could happen, but yet another drop in enrollment made it even harder.

Of 362 Eagle students, 104 went to DCPS and 199 to other charters. A list of destination schools is given at the end.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

I was swimming in the pro-charter policy waters 20 years ago when this all was catching on, and I think you’re wrong. That’s probably what it has become, but that wasn’t the concept.

Well, that was 20 years ago. In the present, the PCSB has various ways to intervene, and they failed to use them.

DP. Obviously the best intervention would have been to close the school before the school year started, before the lottery. But the school wasn't insolvent then, do closing it would not have been the right thing to do at that time.

People view charter schools in DC as regular public schools, as another branch of DCPS. But they aren't.

this was all predictable but so many idiots citizens voting for charter loving politicians. i blame the mayor in part, she is part of this lineage. if you werent living here 15/20 yrs ago you dont know. the entire concept is dumb and inefficient

And yet, it has kept many more students in the school district over the years and turned around the trend for many families to move or go private if they don't live in district for JKLMs.