Eagle Charter School Sudden Closure Again Raises Transparency Questions

The latest press accounts of Eagle Academy Public Charter School’s demise, with doors shutting following money and enrollment woes just before school opened today (26), have centered on the unwanted disruption for families and teachers. Roughly 350 students were ready for the happy new-backpack rituals that begin grades pre-K to 3, but the D.C. Public Charter School Board on August 19 rejected a last-minute plan to hand off Eagle’s two floundering campuses to the 15-school powerhouse Friendship Charter; Eagle announced its closure the following day.

But the urgent scrambles of staff and families to find new places to teach and learn suggest broader questions about the school choice marketplace overseen by the Public Charter School Board — seven members named by the mayor and confirmed by the D.C. Council. It’s deja vu all over again, in Yogi Berra’s famous phrase, as the same scenario of sudden closures and staff and families in the dark in 2019 led to D.C. Council review of transparency in the charter sector.

D.C. charters have grown since 1996 to almost equal the D.C. Public Schools, with 69 independently run nonprofit organizations, called local education agencies, operating 135 schools that enrolled over 47,000 last year (48 percent of all students). The D.C. Council budget this coming year will provide charter schools with over $1.3 billion in public funds.

Washington City Paper in 2019 captioned Rachel Cohen’s deeply reported history with a headline capturing the highlights, “How Charter Schools Won D.C. Politics: Federal intervention, an army of lobbyists, and taxpayer money have helped D.C. charters keep local lawmakers off their backs.”

The charter board’s authorizing law requires that it must revoke a school’s charter if it finds “financial mismanagement” or if the school is “no longer economically viable.” It’s crucial how the board defines—and acts on—these mandates to safeguard the public funds involved.

So as to Eagle — who knew what and when? If the charter board does not do its own public after-action review, the D.C. Council could hold a useful roundtable to get answers.

• What may have been missed when the charter board initially found no financial mismanagement in a 2023 review (though that evaluation changed in a few months)?
• Had financial problems accumulated for some time as news reports suggest, yet parents and staff are quoted having little idea about the detailed facts and the implications of declining enrollments at Eagle (from 838 to 412 in years 2019 to 2023, according to the Post)?
• Were critics in the community correct in noting that Eagle’s continued high salaries, unpaid bills, cash shortages, and an ill-fated expansion into Nevada (where state regulators in June closed the school after a year of financial problems) all should have been signs of trouble ahead? 

[The takeover proposal] raised questions over how Eagle was able to operate under financial strain for so long. Some advocates have also pointed to a lack of transparency around how the proposed deal came to be and say the public should have had more opportunities to weigh in.

But some of those who ran the school said they had only a murky understanding of its finances. Sabrina O’Gilvie, the interim chief executive, said during a July 10 charter board meeting that discussions about the school’s budget occurred during closed meetings between the accounting team and former chief executive and financial officer Joe Smith.

Senior staff and department heads “were not in the decision-making meetings, we were not kept abreast, and whatever was presented at, for example, board meetings, was what they determined to present, and it made it seem we were relatively stable,” O’Gilvie said. “We were actually told we were in a good financial position, until around about October [2023] it slowly started to shift.”

Lauren Lumpkin, “Eagle Academy to close after D.C. board rejects school takeover plan.” Washington Post, August 20, 2024.

Information is essential for a consumer facing any complex decision in a competitive marketplace. Schools in a choice setup like D.C. are a special kind of market (without the price signal that is all-important when buying a car, appliance, or furniture), but parents still need information as they select a child’s school — considering features such as student learning growth, staff qualifications, openings for siblings, after care, and location.  

The D.C. charter board works hard to provide information to help parents choose a school based on sound data.

Still, review of the Eagle Academy history leading to its failure needs to consider if full details were available timely. For example, if financial problems had been disclosed earlier in the 2023-24 year, parents could have made another choice for fall 2024 if they judged the school a risky bet. Regulators in any marketplace are not a complete substitute for timely flow of sound details to consumers.

D.C. laws require other public bodies to provide open meetings, records, and data.  But not individual charter schools. (The central board is covered by the Open Meetings and Freedom of Information Acts.)  Though few states’ charter laws have such exemptions, D.C. law was not improved in this regard until a few years ago, and then only in part.  

That story began in 2019 as reform calls boiled over in a situation foreshadowing the present, as parents and staff flooded a Council hearing about short-notice charter school closures that turned out to have been debated by officials behind closed doors.

After months of intense lobbying, nine of the 13 D.C. legislators voted to apply the Open Meetings Act to individual charter schools’ boards effective in 2020-21. The pandemic disrupted all meetings beginning in 2020, but adherence to the law was llmited even more than a year later. Research by EmpowerEd in 2022 (reported in a Twitter post) found spotty compliance with rules such as agenda and minutes posted. (Results spreadsheet here.) And the Coalition has referred community complaints to Office of Open Government that enforces the Open Meetings Act. See, for example, their 2022 opinion finding multiple violations by Eagle Academy regarding board meeting notices and records.

The D.C. Council should consider whether the Eagle Academy saga suggests again, as in 2019, that additional transparency is needed in the charter school sector — especially adding access to schools’ records via the Freedom of Information Act.  

Coalition research for the 2019 debate showed D.C. is far outside the norm — most other states include charter schools in their open records law, and charter advocacy organizations’ model state laws to this day do not oppose it.

D.C. Council members in the marathon 2019 hearing found D.C. charter school officials’ predictions of record-request burdens lacked credible facts; the central charter board is covered by FOIA, and its requests have been modest – around 70 in 2019 and 20 last year, most dispatched quickly, requiring small staff effort. The Open Government Coalition 2019 testimony offered multiple suggestions for gathering more data on early experience after the law is changed and practical ways to address concerns that might develop.   

The Coalition looks forward to working with others to once again urge bringing charter schools under FOIA, and to ensure full information about charter schools is publicly accessible via meetings, records, and data. To share experiences about charter transparency or to offer other help in advocacy, contact us at info@dcogc.org.