Mableton Charter School in Jeopardy

 Superintendent Michael Hinojosa is not recommending the renewal of the charter for .

The Cobb County Board of Education will vote Sept. 29 on the petition to keep open the 5-year-old school, which has 621 students and has received  in its support at several school board meetings.

Patch verified the superintendent’s position during a break in Wednesday’s school board work session after Hinojosa provided recommendations on three other charter petitions but not on the Mableton charter school.

Hinojosa is recommending the renewal of the . He is opposing two proposed charter schools, STEAM Academy of Cobb and Turning Point Charter Leadership Academy School of Excellence.

The school board will vote on all four petitions Sept. 29. The board’s decision applies to the 2012-13 school year.

16 Areas of Concern

Robert Benson, the school district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, cited 10 negative historical aspects and six unacceptable aspects of the Mableton charter school during a 54-minute discussion.

Among the concerns:

• Leadership instability. The school is on its fourth principal and has two vacancies on its seven-member board.
• Financial mismanagement. The school ran a deficit of $3,049,097 in its first four years. Management company Imagine Schools Inc. made a contribution of $3,299,096 to remove the debt.
• Poor reporting of special-needs students to the district.
• Hiring teachers with “questionable qualifications.”

See the attached PDF files to read the district’s reviews of the four schools.

Benson analyzed the Mableton school’s academic success by comparing the percentage of students attaining “exceeds” status on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests for math and English/language arts with the results from the Cobb County schools the Mableton students were zoned to attend, such as Bryant, Clay and Harmony Leland elementary schools and Lindley and Garrett middle schools.

For example, four out of 164 charter seventh-graders (2.4 percent) achieved “exceeds” from 2009 to 2011, while Lindley had 119 out of 1,260 seventh-graders (9.4 percent) earn that rating.

Board member Kathleen Angelucci of North Cobb’s Post 4 questioned Benson’s decision to chart only the students who achieved “exceeds” status, not those who met the standards.

Benson said he pulled out the top-scoring students to make the distinction between the schools clearer.

Principal Peppered with Questions

School Principal Marcus Barber faced an onslaught of questions from school board members.

David Morgan, whose South Cobb post includes Mableton, said Imagine International Academy of Mableton (IIAM) was failing to meet its existing charter, which states that in Years 2 to 5 “the percent of students meeting the On Target or Exceeding Target standards will improve from the prior year by at least 5 percentage points and exceed district and state averages.”

Based on Morgan’s research, seventh-graders in 2011 were nearly two grade levels behind in math, reading and language arts on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills compared with the average Cobb seventh-grader.

“We are a K-8 charter school … and you only cited seventh grade across the district,” Barber said.

He said Morgan provided third- and fifth-grade scores at a town-hall meeting that ranked IIAM third and fourth in the South Cobb area.

“The ITBS is given to first, third, fifth and seventh, and if you show a comparison to ours and the district, we are doing well,” Barber said.

“As a charter school, they come to us for a reason,” said Barber, who’s in his third year as principal. “I don’t know if the district is not providing for them adequate services or the parents’ desires, but they come to our school for a reason. And when they come to our school, we take them from where they are, and we push them forward to where we think and want them to go to reach their full potential.”

As a former charter school teacher and principal, Morgan said he understands Barber's position. But he said every day as a principal he was expected to accomplish what was stated in the school charter.

“If we did not accomplish it, we were held accountable; if we did, we could move forward,” Morgan said.

He wrote that from the start of the 2008 school year until the end of the 2011 school year, IIAM had 63 chances to meet the standards in its charter for reading, language arts and math, and it met only five. “That constitutes an overall success rate of 7 percent.”

The charter was written before Barber came on board, but he said the school has grown the past three years. He questioned Morgan’s figures and said the school is meeting 75 percent to 80 percent of its performance goals.

Focus on Original Charter Criticized

The school’s curriculum director, Teresa Lewis, questioned Morgan’s insistence on holding the school accountable to its original charter.

She said her sixth-grade granddaughter attends IIAM because her local school, Floyd Middle, didn’t perform well in “any subgroup or category” for Adequate Yearly Progress in 2011, while the charter school did make AYP.

“Should this charter school be denied continuing because of what was stated in terms of meeting those goals when you know the entire history of the school?” Lewis asked Morgan.

“We have to hold the school accountable to the commitment that has been made,” Morgan said. “We can’t pick and choose and say, ‘Well, based on the historical context,’ because if we do that, then that to me will set a detrimental precedent because what we have to do is take the information that has been agreed and committed upon. … That’s how we ultimately find out how valuable and viable an entity has been.”  

Barber acknowledged that IIAM got off to a rocky start but said the renewal charter petition boasts “more realistic” goals and “what we can do.”

After the meeting, Morgan told Patch that the school could have amended its charter in the past five years.

“It’s an emotional issue, and people feel connected to their school,” he said. “But my job is to do what’s in the best interest of students.”

If the board votes to close the charter school, Hinojosa said, the district will be prepared to absorb the students.

“None of the schools they (are zoned) to are at capacity,” he said. “The problem is having academic interventions for them if they’re behind.”

Morgan is due to speak at 6:30 tonight at a town-hall-style meeting at Imagine International Academy of Mableton.

Smyrna Charter Recommended

International Academy of Smyrna (IAS) did not make AYP in 2011 for the first time in the school’s four years, and Hinojosa said he is concerned about a projected five-year operating loss of $2,566,326. But he recommended approving the school’s renewal petition.

The charter school severed its relationship with Imagine Schools after the 2010-11 school year and became self-managed.

That move is saving the school about $700,000 this year, IAS Treasurer Terald Melton said, and the school renegotiated its lease by $500,000.

The school district’s review raised concerns about the school’s ability to generate revenue through grants and donations, but Melton said the school could easily raise $350,000 during the first year of fundraising.

The school, offering kindergarten through eighth grade, has averaged 575 students during its history.

“I thought it went very well, and we'd like to make sure the financial piece is clearer on both sides with CCSD and our school,” Melton said of the meeting.

The school district raised seven areas of concern with the petition from STEAM Academy of Cobb, which didn’t have any representatives at the meeting. The problems include jointly authorizing the start-up with the  and offering a budget that overstates projected revenue from full-time-equivalent students.

Turning Point Charter Leadership Academy School of Excellence’s petition has 11 areas that concerned the district. They include revenues, expenditures and how the school will “establish baseline from which to begin (academic) measurements.”