Arizona woman seeks to revive charter school
Tiny Secondary Learning Center closed by ex-principal amid sex abuse allegations
The leader of a Phoenix charter school says she plans to take over Santa Fe’s Secondary Learning Center, which was closed by its former principal in the middle of the spring semester, just months before parents filed a lawsuit claiming a male tutor at the private school had sex with a teen girl.
If everything falls into place, Trish McCarty said, she will reopen the school, located on a small campus on St. Francis Drive, by early September. She plans to rename it the StarShine Secondary Learning Center.
“I would say it is 98 percent certain,” said McCarty, founder of the financially troubled StarShine Academy in Phoenix.
McCarty was a friend of the Secondary Learning Center’s founder, Dana Rodda, who died of breast cancer in 2016. She said she wants to operate the school to honor Rodda’s legacy.
Her effort to revive the Secondary Learning Center, also known as the Santa Fe Secondary School, comes just after the parents of two students filed a state District Court lawsuit accusing tutor Joel Abraham of having sex with a
14-year-old female student and making sexual advances toward another girl. The complaint, filed earlier this month, also says that former Principal Antony Berzack, who purchased the school from Rodda in 2014, did nothing to stop Abraham’s behavior and retaliated against a teacher who had voiced concerns about him.
Several people filed police reports accusing Abraham of abusing students, but he has not been charged with a crime. Greg Gurulé, a spokesman for the Santa Fe Police Department, said a criminal investigation into Abraham is not closed but will remain inactive “until more information is presented to the investigators handling the case.”
McCarty said she helped arrange the sale of the school to Berzack while Rodda, who had operated it for more than 20 years, was battling breast cancer.
She also helped Rodda earn accreditation for the school through the national nonprofit accrediting agency AdvancED, she said. The school is accredited into 2019.
“I feel it’s the right thing to do,” McCarty said of reopening the school. “We will try to start over and bridge Dana’s plans and ideas and get back to having some of the original board members who helped her in the first place. I’m trying to do the right thing, to right the name of Secondary. I don’t think the quality of what the teachers did here is tainted by the lawsuit.”
The suit, which also names board member Randall Corwin as a defendant, alleges Berzack encouraged female students to take private lessons with Abraham and defended Abraham when anyone questioned the tutor’s off-campus interactions with students.
In a September 2014 interview on KSFR’s Radio Cafe, Berzack said the school wanted students to mingle with adult educators at off-campus events, including at clubs. “There’s no problem with 12-year-olds or 17-year-olds hanging out with us because we are good people,” he said.
Berzack closed the Secondary Learning Center in April, weeks before the spring semester was scheduled to end. The father of one student at the school, who asked that his name not be published, said Berzack sent an email to parents in April, saying he was closing the school because of civil and criminal allegations.
Berzack did not return a call seeking comment this week. Neither did Corwin.
Efforts to reach Abraham for comment were unsuccessful.
The lawsuit says he may be using an alias.
According to police reports filed between 2015 and 2017, efforts to get Abraham to talk about the child sexual abuse allegations were unsuccessful, and he would never clearly identify himself to officers. On at least one occasion, he provided an Arizona driver’s license issued in 1994 that identified him only as “Joel.” The license was not set to expire until 2037.
In one interview with police, a report says, Abraham told officers that Berzack was both his employer and landlord.
Berzack called police in 2016 to file a complaint against the mother who had accused Abraham of sexually abusing her daughter, telling officers that the charges were unfounded and that he feared for the reputation of the school.
“I thought he was young to be in charge of a school,” McCarty said of Berzack, who is in his early 30s. “Dana and I talked about that, but she was in big trouble. She was fighting for her life. She needed some money, and she needed to have the school taken over, and she did not have anybody else but Antony to do it.”
McCarty said she does not know how much Berzack paid Rodda for the school, and she is not purchasing the school from Berzack but is working with the school building’s landlord to arrange a new lease.
McCarty has tried twice before to open a school in Santa Fe. In both 2011 and 2012, she applied to the New Mexico Public Education Commission, which oversees state-chartered schools, for a charter to open the StarShine Lisa Law Peace School on the campus of the former St. Catherine Indian School. The commission rejected the effort both times.
The StarShine Academy in Phoenix filed for bankruptcy last year but has not closed. McCarty said at the time that the bankruptcy was tied in part to a $12 million loan the school took out to move to a new facility.
She had few interactions with Berzack, she said, but she thought he seemed confident that he could run a school. “I think that he thought it would be a prestigious thing to do.”
She knew nothing of Abraham, McCarty said. “I had no idea he existed.”
Berzack called her late last week to say he was leaving Santa Fe, she said. He told her he could not talk about the school, the civil case or Abraham.
He also told her he would not transfer the school’s assets, website or student academic records to her, she said, and she discovered that he already sold all of the school’s furniture, computers and textbooks.
McCarty did not respond to questions about how much it will cost her to reopen the school or where the money would come from.
The small school rarely enrolled more than 30 students in grades 4-12 in any one year. McCarty said she might start out with students only in grades 6-12.
She said she believes many of the Secondary Learning Center’s students, parents and teachers want to return, as long as Berzack and Abraham are not connected with it.
Ron Alt, whose son attended the school, said he thinks McCarty could successfully reopen it.
“There are a lot of families who would like to see the school restarted, and that all relates to their previous relationship with Dana,” he said.