Santa Clara County reverses decision to close San Jose charter school

Officials at Cornerstone Academy — a highperforming charter school that has served thousands of students on the East Side for a decade — overcame an emotional battle this week to stop it from closing.

In front of more than 100 parents, students and educators, the Santa Clara County Board of Education Wednesday night voted 5-2 to approve an appeal to renew the charter petition of Cornerstone Academy. Board President Claudia Rossi and board member Peter Ortiz dissented.

Following nearly three months of uncertainty, the county’s decision was met with loud cheers, celebratory hugs — and even some tears of joy — from those in the audience.

“It has been very stressful and frustrating,” Khang Nguyen, a parent of a first and fourth

grade Cornerstone student, said after the meeting. “But we’re excited tonight because everyone — the students, the teachers and the parents — are all working hard for the school’s highperforming results, and it would have been really unfair to close it.”

The award- winning school, which is part of the East San Jose charter network Alpha Public Schools, opened its doors in 2010 to serve kindergarten through sixth grade students. The Franklin-McKinley School District first renewed the school’s charter in 2015 and then allowed it to expand to eighth grade in 2016.

Cornerstone parents, teachers and school officials said they were blindsided Oct. 22 when the district’s board of education voted 3-2 to reject the school’s charter renewal.

The board said it could not support the renewal because Cornerstone did not serve any students with “moderate to severe” disabilities, did not enroll enough Latino students and that the test scores of its students with disabilities were declining.

The recent controversy over Cornerstone’s renewal is tied to a broader debate over the role that charter schools should play within California’s public school system. Charters are free, publicly funded and independently operated schools.

Under state law, school districts are required to provide charters with reasonable facilities and resources.

Every three to five years, charters must go before their local school district to request a renewal, and districts are limited to certain legal grounds that they can use to reject a charter.

Although Cornerstone leaders acknowledge that they have room for improvement when it comes to their student demographic makeup, they say that the disagreement between the charter and the FranklinMcKinley School District over its number of students with disabilities was primarily a result of miscommunication.

In August of 2019, Alpha Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Daniel Glover sent a letter to the Franklin-McKinley School District stating that Cornerstone did not enroll “any students with moderate/ severe disabilities” and did not have any “moderate/severe education specialists because of the population and needs of its scholars.” At the Oct. 22 board meeting in which the district rejected the school’s renewal, the charter did not refute that statement.

But when school leaders went before the county board a month later, they changed their tune. According to Glover, he was referring to the designations of teacher credentials rather than the disability levels of students.

The State of California Commission on Teacher Credentialing states that “moderate to severe disabilities” include autism, deaf or blindness, moderate to severe intellectual disabilities, multiple disabilities or serious emotional disturbance.

Although Cornerstone does not currently employ any special education teachers who have a credential for the specialty area of “moderate/severe disabilities,” they do have teachers with credentials to serve students with “mild/moderate” disabilities and who possess a designation to serve students with more severe disabilities, such as autism, according to school officials. Over the past several years, the school has served at least 30 students with disabilities annually — some of whom required an individual behavioral aid at all times.

In deciding to renew the school’s charter, the county’s board of education members stressed that Cornerstone must provide clear communication with them moving forward.

The charter, in turn, made numerous commitments to the county, including increasing its recruitment efforts to Latino families and families of students with disabilities, adding at least three parents to its school board within the next year and overall, improving its transparency.

Board member Joseph Di Salvo called their decision “educational justice” and an example of “democracy in action.”

“I’ve always advocated for these decisions to be made at a local level — not at the county. But it’s good in this case because we have the opportunity to redress the issue,” Di Salvo said during the meeting.

But even so, some of the county’s board of education members struggled to get behind the school. Rossi, a parent of a child with a severe disability, said the school’s lack of teachers with the credentials to teach the most disabled students in their community was a great detriment.

“Even though you did cite repeatedly that you did not engage in discriminatory practices, if the staffing is not there to serve specialneeds students with the more severe deficits, then those parents like me would not apply,” Rossi told Cornerstone leaders.

Wednesday night marked only the second time that the county board of education has voted on a charter renewal after a district has denied it. In 2014, the county’s education board approved a charter renewal for Sunrise Middle School after the San Jose Unified School District rejected it. In addition to the two renewal pleas, the county has voted on 37 initial charter school petitions that were turned down by districts — approving just half of those.

Cornerstone Academy will continue to share a campus with the Franklin McKinley School District’s Robert F. Kennedy Elementary School, but the county’s board of education now will be its overseeing agency.

“We are thrilled at the board’s decision,” Shara Hegde, the founder of Cornerstone and chief school operator for Alpha Public Schools, said after the meeting. “I think their decision is reflective of all of our hard work and our strong performance. Academic achievement is the most important thing that they’re supposed to look at and that happened tonight.”