SCS board votes to close City University Boys Prep

A Whitehaven charter school will have to appeal to the state for any hope of staying open next year following a vote from the Shelby County Schools board on Tuesday.

The board voted 6-3 not to renew the charter of City University Boys Preparatory school for another 10 years. That effectively closes the school at the end of this academic year.

City University Chancellor R. Lemoyne Robinson said he plans to file an appeal to the state Board of Education within 10 days.

“I tell parents tonight, it’s not over,” Robinson said following the vote.

The board voted to renew the charter network’s Memphis high school, City University School of Liberal Arts, along with Freedom Preparatory Academy and STAR Academy.

‘Kids were regressing at City University’

The district recommended the board vote not to renew City University Boys Prep, a middle school with fewer than 100 students, citing poor academic performance and a lack of growth over the past five years.

“Kids were regressing at City University,” Chief of Strategy and Performance Management Brad Leon said.

Parents, teachers and former middle school students came and spoke to the board to plead their case for the school to remain open. They held signs in the crowd that read “City Boys Matter.”

The board held a grievance hearing for City University leaders and members of the public to speak about the school.

Malcolm King, a City University senior, said he went to the middle school and is now participating in dual enrollment college courses in high school.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the experience I had in Boys Preparatory Middle School,” he said.

Veronica Stewart, a math teacher at the school, said she didn’t see any cause for them to shut down. Parents are engaged in their children’s education, she said.

“We’re one unified family that’s just trying ... to keep our school open,” Stewart said.

In 2017, just 15.9 percent of the school’s students were proficient in English language arts. Just 10.1 percent were proficient in math.

The school, which is sponsored by the The Influence1 Foundation, also has just 87 students despite its original target of 350.

Push for academic support from district

Robinson argued that flawed state testing was being used to judge his school when Shelby County Schools Superintendent Dorsey Hopson had expressed no confidence in the test. He also said the district should be providing academic supports to students in his school.

Robinson contends his school was provided intervention support in the form of curriculum materials and practice tests for students under the former Memphis City Schools.

Leon said he’s seen no evidence of that, or that SCS ever promised to provide extra supports for the school.

Bill White, director of planning and accountability for SCS, said the nature of charter schools is they are autonomous. “The whole point of a charter school is for them to have their own curriculum, their own interventions,” White said.

Leon said multiple years’ of testing data, both reflecting where students are academically and how much they grew, showed the school was not performing well.

“There’s nothing in their performance record that says, sure, they should get another 10 years with children,” Leon said.

Charter schools are public but operated by private entities. Most of the charters in Memphis are approved and overseen by the Shelby County Schools board, and must go through the renewal process to stay open.

The renewal process is one of the few opportunities the district has to issue checks and balances on charter schools, which cannot otherwise be forced to close unless they end up on the state’s Priority List of schools performing in the bottom 5 percent, or in the case of an egregious financial or other issue.

Reach Jennifer Pignolet at jennifer. pignolet@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @JenPignolet.