Ivy Preparatory Academy is being forced to shutter its boys school, with state officials citing poor financial management and weak academic performance, school officials said Monday.
The State Charter School Commission voted in March not to renew the academy’s charter. The group said Ivy Prep’s Young Men’s Leadership Academy “did not provide students a better educational opportunity than that which is provided by DeKalb County, the school’s comparison district.”
The academy, which opened in August 2011, will close June 30. It has about 226 boys enrolled from kindergarten through eighth grade, a school spokeswoman said Monday. The students will have to find schools to attend in the districts they came from including DeKalb, Gwinnett and Atlanta.
Ivy Prep’s three remaining schools — including Ivy Preparatory Academy in Gwinnett County and Ivy Preparatory Academy in Kirkwood — did not meet an Oct. 1 deadline to turn in annual audits to the State Charter School Commission. Alisha Thomas Morgan, executive director for the Ivy Preparatory Academies, said she was working with outside vendors to get those audits completed. Morgan said the financial issues predated her coming to Ivy Prep about a year ago.
Paul Williams, the State Charter School Commission vice chairman, said while he respected the work Morgan was doing at the school, the institutions needed to demonstrate compliance and financial viability.
“I knew coming into this role that (the Young Men’s Leadership Academy) was struggling academically,” Morgan said in a statement released by Ivy Prep. “We immediately put a number of supports in place, including a new principal and intense training for teachers. We’ve received positive feedback about our efforts, including from our authorizer, but with YMLA, we just ran out of time.”
It’s the second of the academy’s schools to close this year. Administrators pulled the plug on the high school in October, with students being sent back to schools in Gwinnett and DeKalb counties and Atlanta, saying at the time they could not do the job they hoped to do in educating the high-school students.
DeKalb County received 48 of those students, meeting with parents to offer a glimpse into how their students would transition into the district. The number of students coming to DeKalb from the closing of the boys academy was unavailable Monday.
Open enrollment for accelerated programs ended Feb. 19, but DeKalb is accepting applications for its choice schools as well as nine district-authorized start-up charter schools.
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