State panel says close two charter schools

A state panel has recommended that Secretary of Education Mark Murphy and the State Board of Education should close the Reach Academy for Girls and Gateway Lab School charter schools at the end of the school year, citing poor academic performance.

The Charter School Accountability Committee’s recommendation now goes to Murphy and the board, who must choose whether they will renew the schools’ charters or accept the committee’s recommendation and close them. That decision will be made at the board’s Dec. 18 meeting.

A public hearing is scheduled for 6 p.m. Dec. 10 at the Carvel State Office Building, 820 North French Street, in which supporters of the school will be able to plead their case to keep the school open.

The Department’s academic reviews for the past school year gave both schools either a “D” or an “F” in almost all measures of student performance or growth on test scores.

At Reach, only about 32 percent of students were rated proficient in math and only 49 percent of students were rated proficient in English last year. At Gateway, only 24 percent of students were rated proficient in math and only 37 percent were proficient in English.

The state average was about 66 percent in math and about 70 percent in English.

The test scores also suggest students are not growing as quickly as the state expected. Last year, less than 40 percent of Reach students and less than half of Gateway students met their academic growth targets last year in both math and reading.

Reach is the state’s only public all-girls school. Last year, 84 percent of its students were considered low-income.

Gateway is a charter dedicated to students who are “struggling to achieve academic success in a traditional school environment.” Almost half of its students were low-income last year, while more than half were special education students.

Should Murphy and the board choose to shutter the schools, they would be the second and third charters to receive that fate in little more than a month.

At last month’s board meeting, state officials yanked the Maurice J. Moyer Academic Institute’s charter, meaning it is slated to close at the end of this school year.

State officials voted to revoke Reach’s charter last year and the school was supposed to have already been closed. But the school sued, arguing it was discriminatory against girls to close an all-female public school while an all-male school remained open.

A judge forced the state to keep Reach open this year so that he could sift through arguments in the lawsuit. But the school agreed to dismiss the case as long as the Department agreed to wait until the school’s charter was up for renewal, which led to Monday’s decision.

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