The State Board of Education on Friday gave Fulton Science Academy High School a second chance to save its charter, overriding a recommendation from the Fulton County School Board that the charter of the 8-year-old Alpharetta school be terminated.
The Fulton board unanimously advised in December that the science high school’s charter be terminated for numerous reasons, including poor record-keeping, poor finances and lack of transparency.
But on Friday, state board member Helen Odom Rice made a motion to “remand” the case — which she identified by number, without naming the school — back to the Fulton board. “I did not feel like they (the school) had an adequate hearing,” she said. Her motion was passed unanimously, without comment, by state board members present.
Maria Beug-Deeb, chairman of the Fulton Science Academy High School Governing Board, said in a statement: “I appreciate the State School Board’s careful consideration of the issues related to the school’s charter. We are committed to working with the Fulton County School Board to fully resolve this matter.”
No date has been set for the second hearing.
The school, meantime, has already applied to the State Charter Schools Commission to get a new five-year charter through the state so it won’t have to deal with the Fulton board, which in 2011 voted to terminate the charter of Fulton Science Academy’s sister middle school, which is now a private school.
Charter schools are public schools that have been granted organizational and instructional flexibility in exchange for a promise to pursue specific educational goals. They have governance councils that act as their own school boards. The State Charter School Commission was established so that schools that were denied charters by local school districts could apply to the state to get a charter.
Fulton County Schools Superintendent Robert Avossa said Friday he was “extremely frustrated” by the state board’s decision to give Fulton Science Academy High School another chance to save its charter.
During the December hearing at which charter termination was urged, Kenneth Zeff, chief of strategy and innovation for Fulton County Schools, said Fulton Science Academy’s enrollment and finances were in a “downward spiral.”
“This is not a hole they can dig themselves out of,” Zeff said at the time. And Fulton school board president Linda Schultz cited the school’s shrinking reserve fund, which was below $500,000 — about what it takes to operate the school for a month.
But school attorney Rocco Testani argued there were a lot of unsubstantiated allegations in the district’s report on the school’s alleged failings, in particular the claim that the school forced graduating seniors to pay money to take required courses online. The district’s report on the school that prompted the hearing “is inaccurate in many respects and incomplete in others,” Testani said. “We need to take a deep breath and dial down the hyperbole.”
Fulton school board members determined in December that there was indeed no evidence that students were forced to pay the school for online classes.
The school had an enrollment of 266 students last year and is making plans to open in August, according to its application for a state charter.
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