Court upholds move to shut charter school
The state revoked the charter of American YouthWorks in 2014.
The Texas Supreme Court on Friday let stand a 4-year-old state decision to shutter a former Southeast Austin charter school.
The state revoked the charter of American YouthWorks in 2014 after it had failed to meet academic or financial standards three years in a row. The Legislature in 2013 passed a law granting the state education commissioner such authority and decreed decisions he or she made are irreversible.
Attorneys for the charter school nonetheless argued in court that the school received the strikes before the new law went into effect, protecting it from being closed, but the school stopped operating in 2014.
In his ruling released Friday, Supreme Court Justice John P. Devine wrote that it wasn’t in the court’s authority to reverse the decisions of the Texas Education Agency to revoke the charters of American YouthWorks as well as Honors Academy, which had operated charter schools throughout North Texas.
“The Texas Education Code empowers the Commissioner of Education to create open enrollment charter schools, regulate them, and make decisions that affect their existence through reviews, renewals, and revocations. Many of the Commissioner’s executive decisions, including those at issue here, are made final or permit only limited administrative review,” he said.
The state faulted the school for not having its money in the right type of bank account, having poor academic performance for a year and submitting a paper copy of a state-required audit two days late, among other issues. School officials at the time told the American-Statesman that many of those problems were technicalities.
School officials had appealed the ruling before the State Office of Administrative Hearings, but they lost. They then appealed it in Travis County state District Court, which had temporarily allowed them to stave off closure.
American YouthWorks still helps students earn their high school diploma through a part-