In spite of rising student test scores, improvements in staffing and administration, and a positive recommendation by the Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Charter Schools, the state Board of Education has refused to renew the charter of a struggling Moore County charter school.

Barring legal action, the precedent-setting March 4 decision by the board effectively closes The Academy of Moore County at the conclusion of this school year and returns its 170-plus students to district schools, some of which have fared even worse on state academic tests.

“They don’t realize how many lives are affected by this,” said Allyson Schoen, the school’s director of education. In an exclusive interview with Carolina Journal, Schoen vowed to fight the decision and decried what she perceived as “a real arrogance” on the part of the board in the way the school’s application for a renewal of its charter was handled.

“We invited the board to come down and take a look at the school,” said Schoen, “and only one of them did. You would think they would want to see what they were voting on.” The Academy of Moore County is located about an hour and a half from Raleigh.

The board’s action stunned administrators and staff. The school, which serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade, had met all the benchmarks on a DPI-approved “corrective action plan” implemented in the fall of 2008 after several years of declining academic performance.

The academy had met its AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) target for the 2008-09 academic year, and preliminary testing in December showed the school was on track for another year of solid growth. School administrators were confident that their application for the renewal of the school’s charter would be approved without much difficulty.

That air of optimism began to change as the board took up the issue of charter renewals at its January 2010 meeting. Schoen had been on the academy’s staff in another capacity during the school’s 2007 charter renewal process, when its test scores and other indicators of effectiveness had been far worse. She said the board approved that three-year renewal request “with no questions asked.”

But according to Schoen, the board’s Leadership for Innovation Committee, chaired by Melissa Bartlett, showed little patience with the DPI staffers who presented the school’s renewal application at the January meeting. Schoen says that Jack Moyer, director of the Office of Charter Schools, was “shut down” by Bartlett when he tried to speak about the recent improvements at the school, specifically data on improved student achievement.

The data Schoen and the academy staff wanted the board to consider was from the school’s MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) diagnostic testing program, which they say showed the school making “significant progress” towards raising test scores. The school purchased the MAP program at DPI’s recommendation in 2008 after several years of sagging scores.

Sensing that something was wrong, Schoen and others at the academy contacted members of their legislative delegations for help in dealing with the board. Schoen believes that was a key factor in the board’s decision to postpone a final vote on the school’s charter renewal until the March 4 meeting.

The postponement didn’t help. A motion to extend the school’s charter by one year, made by board member Christine Greene (the one member who had visited the school) was defeated, and the board ultimately voted to approve a motion made by Bartlett not to renew the school’s charter application.

According to the minutes of that meeting, the decision was taken due to “poor student performance among other reasons stated during the [Leadership for Innovation] committee meetings… .” Schoen says she has no idea what those “other reasons” might be.

In an e-mail, Vanessa Jeter, DPI’s communications director, wrote: “As public schools of choice, charter schools are expected to improve student learning, increase learning opportunities for students, and to encourage innovative teaching methods. In this context, it is appropriate for charter schools to meet specific performance and other requirements in order to receive a charter renewal.”

The Academy of Moore County was founded as MAST Charter in 1997 in Aberdeen. It originally was a school for children from Moore and surrounding counties in grades five through eight. By 2002, the school had achieved “high growth” status, and by the end of the 2004 academic year had been named a “school of distinction.”

The next year, Principal Jack Moyer resigned to take his current position as director of the Office of Charter Schools, and the school entered a significant decline in academic performance. By 2008 the school had become a “low performing” school, the lowest category under the state’s ABCs accountability program, and had not met its growth targets for four years. The school’s administration was “a revolving door,” Schoen said, and high turnover of both staff and students was a continuing problem.

But Schoen points out that much has changed in the two academic years since the school adopted its DPI-approved corrective action plan. In addition to the new diagnostic software, the school’s staff is now 100 percent “highly qualified” by state standards, the administration has been streamlined, and remediation programs in reading, math, and language arts have been implemented.

The school moved this year into a brand new, $2.2 million dollar facility built on donated land. The school day has been extended by 30 minutes, and a Saturday School has been established for grades three through eight.

The Office of Charter Schools recognized these and other improvements in documents submitted for the board’s consideration. Those comments concluded: “Based on the changes that have been implemented and current MAP data, the OCS (Office of Charter Schools) recommends a three year renewal for The Academy of Moore County.”

If the board’s decision stands, the Academy of Moore County will close its doors June 30. Students who now attend the school would attend one of the four regular public schools serving the areas in which they live. Unlike the academy, three of the four schools failed to meet their Annual Yearly Progress targets for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Jim Stegall is a contributor to Carolina Journal.