Union busting charter management company receiving special treatment from Detroit leaders, Michigan governor... Charter school closes in Detroit two weeks before school year begins...
Ralph Bland, head of the so-called "New Paradigm" charter schools in Detroit, waited until two weeks before schools open to tell students in his outfit's high school that they wouldn't have a high school. Above, Bland stands in front of the usual charter hype college banners that charters utilize to lull many poor and working class families into believing they are better than a city's real public schools. Bland's outfit reorganized itself recently in order to avoid unionization. Another more-hype-than-reality charter school just closed in Detroit (which among other things gave Chicago Public Schools Barbara Byrd Bennett and some other educational leaders) two weeks before school is scheduled to begin. "New Paradigm" charter schools told parents and students two weeks before school was scheduled to begin that their highly hyped K-12 school would not actually be serving high school students in the coming year.
The independent news report came to Substance from the Detroit Metro Times (here below):
Students scramble to find new high school after last minute closure announcement
Posted By Allie Gross, Detroit Metro Times, Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 2:23 pm
ORIGINALLY IT WAS the colors that stood out to Jada Hall, as she scrolled through the website for New Paradigm For Education, the management company that has been hired in July to run her K-12 charter school, University YES Academy, this coming fall. The logo for her northwest side school had been altered — a mysterious bright red stripe was now featured on the typically blue and gold pennant.
The rising 12th grader chalked the change up to the management company — red is a prominent color in the logos for the five other charter campuses New Paradigm runs. But then she noticed something else. The grades the site said her school served: K-8. Hall was weeks away from starting her senior year — she was meant to be apart of UYA's first graduating class — and now she suddenly found herself questioning if she even had a school to return to.
The new information was startling, but more so was the lack of communication and clarity. Two days after noticing the changes on the website she and her mother were told, via text, to come to the school for an important — but cryptic — Monday evening meeting for all "rising seniors" (9-11th grade were told to come to the school Tuesday). It was here that she — and about 25 of her peers — found out that the high school — where they planned to show up for the first day of classes in two weeks — was closing. "They call about everything else, but they don't think to call about closing the school down?" the teen, who has been at UYA since 9th grade, questioned after the meeting.
WHILE THE INSTABILITY FELT by the high schoolers at UYA Monday may seem like an isolated incident, it's in fact one of several topsy-turvy occurrences that have transpired over the past few months — and really years.
UYA, which opened its doors to sixth-grade students in the fall of 2010, came into local spotlight in the spring of 2015 when staff made public their desires to unionize. The decision was ill-received by the school's then-charter management company, New Urban Learning (NUL), and by April NUL announced that it would be leaving UYA.
"We believe that a larger charter management organization with more resources and fresh ideas would better enable UYA to meet its 90-90-90 goals — game changing goals we believe are attainable," the letter forwarded to the staff by Lesley Ester Redwine, the CEO of NUL, read.
The news was crushing for staff, as the resignation of NUL meant that should the staff vote in favor of a union (which they did a few weeks later) they would have nobody to bargain with. At charter schools, the management company is the employer not the school board — which means the departure of the management company is also the departure of the employer the staff hoped to bargain with. More dispiriting, the departure of NUL (the employer) meant that everyone on staff was terminated and had to re-apply for their jobs. At the start of the following school year, only 17 of the school's 68 employees had been there the year prior.
While these were clear signs of instability there was one consistency. After leaving the school as NUL, Redwine created a new management company — InspirED Education — and submitted an RFP to run the school under the new company. The board decided to go with Redwine's new company. In other words: the management company more or less stayed the same, but the obligation to bargain was gone. Redwine argued that she did not need to bargain because InspirED was not at the school at the time of the union vote and that the majority of the staff had changed since then.
What complicates this story — and the instability seen at UYA — is what occurred next. In March the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint, alleging that Redwine created an "alter ego corporation" (InspirED Education) in order to avoid collective bargaining with the UYA staff, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of union representation in the spring of 2015. By May the school's charter authorizer, Bay Mills Community College (located about 342 miles aways from the school), sent a letter of revocation, saying the school was at risk of losing its charter. In June, reports Michigan Radio, the school board struck a deal with the authorizer, which promised to get the school back into "good standings" if it dropped Redwine's management company and found a new company to run the operations. This is where things get particularly tricky.
At the end of June Redwine signed a settlement with Michigan ACTS promising to bargain with the staff; however, two days before the settlement agreement was signed, the UYA board announced their intentions to sign a contact with New Paradigm, a local charter management company run by self-proclaimed "education entrepreneur" Ralph Bland.
While the board essentially had to find a new management company to keep the school open, the move once again shook up the school. For a second year in a row, the entire staff was fired and asked to re-apply for their jobs, and once again the obligation to bargain was voided. The big difference this time around is how it would so directly affect the students.
AS PARENTS AND STUDENTS streamed out of the UYA cafeteria Monday evening the spirit of defeat was palpable. While some, like Hall, had a sense of what was to come, many felt blindsided. "It's real messed up, my son has been here since sixth grade and we just found out today that they are eliminating high school," one angry parent, Kelli Vaughn, said, on the verge of tears. "What are we supposed to do? Another black school closed down. More black kids cannot be educated because they want to do what they want to do. Where are our kids going to go?"
Why the school would wait till the end of the summer to share this news was a question that kept cropping up. Were the kids — and their educational experiences — so insignificant that it could be relegated to the bottom of a list, an afterthought to share before the school year starts? Is transience just an accepted part of going to school in Detroit? Parents and students mulled over these questions as they tried to make sense of the news they had just heard. "I don't care that they're closing so much that they waited until the end of the summer to tell us," said rising senior Aleka Simmons, who last fall brought UYA into the public spotlight when she snapped a picture of her commute to school featuring what she says is a daily occurrence: Six children crammed onto a 39-inch seat. (While WXYZ, who picked up the story, criticized UYA for putting the students in a dangerous situation, the school's then-head of school Eric Redwine — Lesley Ester Redwine's husband — told the station that he viewed the seat cramming as a good thing as he was happy to have so many kids enrolled in the school).
Simmon's frustrations were reiterated by her classmates. "They waited like two weeks before school was starting to do this. If they wanted to do this they should have told us at the end of last school year," said Antwan Ramsey, a rising sophomore who was at the meeting with his older brother Antone, a rising senior. The boys said they didn't know where they would go next year, but that the management company had given them a list of suggestions.
Other reports are also becoming available from independent news services. Substance is awaiting coverage from the Detroit Free Press...
Detroit charter school closes just two weeks before first day of class, By Steve Neavling on August 22, 2016
Just two weeks before the first day of class, a charter school on Detroit’s west side notified parents and students today that the high school has closed.
Officials for University YES Academy held an impromptu meeting today to tell high school students they needed to find another school to attend. Only parents and students were allowed in the meeting, and they were barred from using recording devices.
“What are our kids supposed to do?” a parent told Metro Times reporter Allie Gross. “Another black school closed down. More black kids cannot be educated.”
The school’s management company, New Paradigm, handed parents and students a list of six other schools, including one of the company’s own schools, Detroit Edison Public School Academy, Gross reported from outside the meeting. Students criticized New Paradigm for waiting until the last minute to announce the school’s closure.
“They call about everything else, but they don’t think to call about closing the school,” a student told Gross. The University YES Academy, at 14669 Curtis St., will continue to teach K-8.
After the meeting, three bodyguards tried to prevent Gross from interviewing the head of New Paradigm, Ralph Bland, who declined to comment. The academy came under fire in 2015 for taking extraordinary measures to prevent teachers from unionizing.
New Paradigm didn’t return our calls for comment.
