Struggling school keeps charter after board vote
Covenant Keepers College Preparatory Charter School for sixth through eighth grades in southwest Little Rock will keep the state- issued charter it must have to be able to operate.
The Arkansas Board of Education voted 7- 0 Tuesday against pulling the school’s charter, reversing the position taken by the state’s Charter Authorizing Panel when it voted in April to revoke the charter — effective June 30 — because of governance, financial and academic distress problems at the 160- student school.
School founder and Superintendent Valerie Tatum hugged and thanked most, if not all, of the Education Board members after Tuesday’s vote.
Tatum said in an interview that the possible closure of the school that serves a high percentage of black and Hispanic students had the effect of building support for the campus.
“The energy around the revocation has brought more parents to our school,” Tatum
said, noting that the sixthgrade enrollment in the fall is projected to be 75, compared with 50 this year. “More teachers are interested in being hired. It’s been amazing the attention we’ve received through this process.”
Tatum told the Education Board on Tuesday that she intends to leave the school within the next year or two to take on other interests. In the meantime, she will work with staff members at the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, an organization that supports rural and charter public schools, to determine a new leader for the charter school.
The Education Board’s vote allowing the school to continue to operate came after a nearly four- hour hearing that included a presentation on student achievement at Covenant Keepers, and a lot of questions from board members about the system’s management and finances — including a negative fund balance at the end of the 2015- 16 school year.
The board’s motion against revoking the charter does require school leaders to report back to the Education Board by November on student performance on the state- required Aspire tests given last month. That was done with the idea that if there are still concerns, the school could be closed in a way that would give students and faculty sufficient time to find new schools and new jobs for the 2018- 19 school year.
Covenant Keepers, at 5615 Geyer Springs Road, is one of about a dozen schools statewide that is labeled by the state Department of Education as academically distressed because of three or more years of low student performance on state math and literacy exams.
In 2015- 16, nearly 50.9 percent of Covenant Keeper pupils scored at the desired proficient or better levels on state tests. But the school’s three- year average for 201416 is only 45.8 percent proficient, which is short of the 49.5 percent over three years that is necessary to avoid the academic- distress label.
The school’s long- standing distress label is what prompted Education Board member Diane Zook of Melbourne earlier this year to ask the Education Department’s Charter Authorizing Panel to look into the school’s academic record.
On Tuesday, Sarah McKenzie, executive director of the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, compared Covenant Keepers’ achievement levels and achievement growth with Cloverdale, Henderson and Mabelvale middle schools in the Little Rock School District. Cloverdale and Henderson are also labeled as academically distressed.
The independently run, public Covenant Keepers achieved at similar levels as the nearby Little Rock schools in English/ language arts, with sixth- and eighthgraders achieving higher but seventh- graders scoring lower than the comparable schools. Math achievement at Covenant Keepers has been about the same as that in the comparable traditional schools in recent years after scoring lower in 2011- 13, McKenzie said.
In regard to achievement growth, McKenzie said that Covenant Keepers is consistently near the state average and was better than the nearby comparable schools in English/ language arts in 2015- 16. In math, Covenant Keepers is lower than the state average but increased in 2015- 16. Over time, the charter school showed expected growth in math except in seventh grade in 2014- 15 and in eighth grade in 2015- 16, she said.
Members of the Charter Authorizing Panel in April cited a report that the school ended last school year with a $ 110,000 deficit. Panel members also questioned Tatum’s salary of $ 138,000, which is among the top half of superintendent salaries in the state — despite the small size of the school.
Additionally, panel members said they were troubled by the fact that Tatum said she had received grant money for the school from the school’s sponsoring nonprofit corporation, City of Fire Community Development Inc., which she appeared to be a member of based on records kept by the Arkansas secretary of state’s office.
Jess Askew III of the Kutak Rock law firm, who represented Covenant Keepers, told the Education Board that Tatum has not been a member of the sponsoring City of Fire Community Development board of directors since 2008 and was never on the Covenant Keepers School Board.
He noted that the school produced for the Education Board clean audit reports plus records showing Tatum’s annual salary, including five years with no salary increases. He said the school has fund balances this school year in excess of $ 100,000, despite having to repay the state $ 212,000 because of an over- payment in 2015- 16.
“At this point I’m out of things to respond to and talk about because I don’t know what the issues are that brought us here today,” Askew said and adding that the charter panel’s April review on academics and vote to revoke the charter “went off the rails.”
“The school’s charter was renewed for three years ago, in March 2016,” Askew said. “This board unanimously approved the renewal. As best I can tell, nothing bad has happened since then and there has been academic improvement.”
In response to Education Board questions, Askew said the school received a grant from the City of Fire Community Development board to offset the refunding of state money. The City of Fire board in turn received a grant from the Walton Family Foundation based in Bentonville, Askew said. No one from the Education Department followed up to get the grant documentation from the school.
“Should we never be worried about negative financial reports from the school because City of Fire is there to serve as a piggy bank?” Education Board member Jay Barth of Little Rock asked. “If so, how do we evaluate the school in terms of its fiscal health?”
Askew said the school doesn’t have a negative balance and that charter schools typically rely on private fund- raising because the schools are ineligible for any local property tax revenue.
Greg Rogers, the Education Department’s assistant commissioner for fiscal and administration services, and staff members Alicia Moore and Cindy Smith described to the Education Board the issues they had with lack of school responses to their requests for details on school expenditures, including coding and reconciling of expenses. They questioned why so many of the school’s reported expenditures were even- dollar amounts. They also questioned why some people were listed on the school’s website as employees but were reported as receiving tax documents indicating they were vendors to the school.
“In no form are we saying that in their checking account they didn’t have any money,” Rogers told the Education Board. “What we are saying is that at the end of 2015- 16, they had a negative balance.
That means they had more expenditures than revenues for that year.”
“If this was a traditional school, it would have been a trigger” for placing the school in the state’s fiscal- distress program, he added.
Charter school laws have no provisions for fiscal- distress classifications, which result in the state overseeing traditional school district expenditures while the district corrects its financial problems. Failure to correct the financial problems can lead to the state takeover of a district.
Board member Susan Chambers of Bella Vista, who made the motion against revoking the charter, said she saw no red flags in regard to academics at the school but said there are gaps in the trading of information between the school and the Education Department.
Barth said he continues to be concerned about the academic achievement, noting that repeated reports of academic growth don’t come to fruition in terms of removal from the academic- distress list. He asked if there is a systemic problem that is holding the school back.
Education Board member Fitz Hill of Little Rock asked whether the Education
Department provides the charter school with the same level of financial assistance that it provides in academic support. Hill also questioned where the Covenant Keepers pupils would attend school if the charter school were closed.
Ouida Newton of Poyen, also on the Education Board, asked about the possibility of placing the school on probation but others — including Tatum — said that would create an impediment to the school’s success.
Education Board member Charisse Dean of Little Rock said many of the concerns about Covenant Keepers’ governance, finance and academic achievement were addressed. She urged Tatum to take all financial management assistance offered to her and be diligent in keeping employee listings and other information up to date on the school’s website. She said the school is serving a niche of the population in the 72209 Zip code area that would not have easy access to other charter schools and nearby traditional schools have similar achievement records.
“It doesn’t make sense to me that we would shut it down,” Dean said about Covenant Keepers.