The Provost Academy, the state’s first online, statewide charter school, is temporarily shutting down its dropout prevention programs in Macon, Savannah and Augusta.
Explosive student growth — enrollment has boomed from 134 students in August 2012 to nearly 2,000 students a year later — has outstripped the school’s ability to provide specialized services that are required by state law, school officials said. The school’s Bridgescape Centers, set up to serve students who have dropped out of school or who are at risk of dropping out, provide extra assistance in reading and math as well as guidance counseling.
The Macon, Savannah and Augusta centers, which have a combined 220 students, will close from Feb. 14 through the rest of the school year. They are expected to reopen when the new school year begins this fall.
There will be staff reductions at the Bridgescape program in Atlanta, but it will not be shut down, nor will Provost’s brick-and-mortar facility on Atlanta’s Edgewood Avenue.
Bridgescape students are expected to continue their education through Provost’s regular online program, whose curriculum they were already using.
With the exception of Bridgescape’s poorest and most academically challenged students — who will continue to get specialized math assistance — the center’s students in Macon, Savannah and Augusta will go without extra reading and counseling assistance for the rest of this academic year.
Provost Academy is a charter school, meaning it is a public school that has been granted organizational and instructional flexibility in exchange for a promise to pursue specific academic goals.
Bridgescape’s struggles could bolster the argument of critics who say charter schools are often poorly managed and don’t offer students more than they could have gotten from a traditional public school.
But Monica Henson, Provost Academy’s executive director, said she and her colleagues are being fiscally responsible in temporarily shutting down instead of trying to borrow to meet rising costs.
Many of those rising costs are tied to the rapid growth in Provost’s special education student population, which has increased to more than 200 from 34 at the beginning of this school year.
“It’s a huge influx,” Henson said. “We welcome it. We are not complaining about it. But we are faced with having to hire a number of special needs staff.”
Provost, like other public schools in Georgia, gets state funding based in part on student enrollment counts, which are conducted in early October and again in March.
Henson said the school is being funded based on an earlier enrollment count of 941 even though its true enrollment has zoomed to more than double that number.
School districts often rely on reserve funds to handle that problem, but Henson said it is not reasonable to expect a charter school in its first academic year to have reserves.
One Provost parent, Joy Washington, said staff have been distracted by the effort to address the school’s finances. She said her son, a Provost online student who is about to begin applying to colleges, has had questions about his transcript. Washington said Provost officials have been unresponsive as she has sought to have those questions addressed.
Henson said federal privacy laws prevent her from speaking about the circumstances of any specific student, but she said she and her colleagues are not distracted by the effort to keep the school afloat financially.
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