State panel: Close Moyer charter school

The state's Charter School Accountability Committee recommended revoking the charter for troubled Maurice J. Moyer Academic Institute on Friday.

Now, Secretary of Education Mark Murphy must decide whether to seek the State Board of Education's approval to close the school.

"If the concerns were not as significant as they are and the past two years had not been difficult as they were, in my mind it would be somewhat easier to recommend probation than it is now," said David Blowman, Deputy Secretary of Education. "But my personal view is that there is too much history over the last two years in terms of student achievement."

If Murphy and the board vote to close, Moyer would stay open the rest of this school year.

Before Murphy and the board make their Sept. 18 decisions, state officials will hold a public hearing for community members at 6 p.m. Sept. 10 in the second floor auditorium of the Carvel Building in Wilmington.

If Murphy chooses not to seek closure, the state board cannot close the school on its own.

Moyer, a charter school serving mostly at-risk youth in the city of Wilmington, has been at odds with the state for at least two years because of low test scores, problems with its curriculum, high teacher and administrator turnover and other concerns.

The state board voted to put Moyer on formal review in July after results from last year's test scores showed sliding student performance.

Less than a quarter of students were rated "proficient" in reading and barely 10 percent of students were rated "proficient" in math on the state standardized test.

In addition to poor academic performance, the committee said the school is out of compliance with its charter in three other areas.

First, it dinged Moyer for providing appropriate services for at-risk or special needs students. The individual education plans it created for special needs students didn't meet federal requirements, it did not have enough staff to meet those students' needs and didn't follow several procedural safeguards.

Second, the committee found the school's curriculum did not meet the state's academic standards, and its teachers did not understand the Common Core Standards, a national set of expectations for student learning Delaware has adopted.

Finally, committee members cited a poor attendance and discipline record, with too many "unsafe incidents," too many suspensions and too many students missing class.

The committee chose not to say Moyer was out of compliance on three other areas for which it had previously put the school under scrutiny.

C.T. Curry, head of Moyer's board, told the committee that the school has done everything the state has asked to fix its problems and said a new team at the school was making good progress in the first week of school.

"We're having the best start to a year ever," Curry said.

Blowman said there were some signs that the school was making improvements, but said less than a week of school couldn't outweigh two years of problems.

"If this team had been in front of us years ago, we might not be here," Blowman told the school's representatives. "But how many times can we accept 'we'll get it right this time?"

Debate over Moyer goes back to before a previous incarnation of the school was closed in 2010 for poor performance. With the support of state and Wilmington officials, a new school reopened on the site called the New Moyer Academy, later renamed the Moyer Academic Institute.

Should Murphy and the board close Moyer, it would be the second charter revoked in as many years.

Reach Academy for Girls lost its charter last year, but was kept open by a judge because of a lawsuit alleging it was discriminatory to close the state's only public all-girls' school while leaving an all-boys' school open.

Reach and the State Department of Education agreed to leave the school open until its next review.

An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect start time for the Sept. 10 meeting.

Contact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com or at 324-2428. Follow him on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.