Franklin Towne charter has sued the Philly school district, citing recent charter bias investigation

Franklin Towne Charter High School — facing revocation of its charter over allegations it rigged its admissions lottery — has filed a lawsuit against the Philadelphia School District, asking a judge to force the school system to replace the hearing officer set to begin proceedings on Wednesday.

Citing a recently released report examining allegations of racial bias in Philadelphia charter authorization and closure, the charter school’s lawyers said the hearing officer, Rudy Garcia, must go. Garcia is an independent hearing officer but has presided over most of the district’s revocation and non-renewal proceedings, issuing findings and recommendations on whether the school board should vote to close a charter.

Although the report found that the district engaged in no overt bias, the report recommended that the school board stop using Garcia for most hearings “as this practice has created the appearance of an improper bias toward the Board of Education and has resulted in a lack of trust in the system from the charter school sector.”

Franklin Towne lawyers said the school asked Garcia to recuse himself voluntarily, and he refused. Then, they said, they asked the school board to remove Garcia, and after the board refused, they filed suit late Monday.

A spokesperson for the school board declined to comment. A pre-hearing conference is scheduled for Wednesday, in what is only the first stage in the charter revocation process: Following hearings, the school board will have to vote on whether to revoke Franklin Towne’s charter. Even if it does, the school has the right to appeal.

Franklin Towne’s charter is in jeopardy following accusations that it manipulated its lottery to exclude students from certain zip codes. A whistleblower from the school asserted that its longtime former CEO, Joe Venditti, had ordered the exclusion of specific zip codes from January’s lottery; an Inquirer analysis in May found astronomically small — 1 in 1,296 trillion — odds that the results happened naturally.

Students in majority-Black zip codes were particularly disadvantaged by the lottery, which accepted students from 22 zip codes, but not 17 other city zip codes, The Inquirer found.

Venditti abruptly resigned in February, after the whistleblower, Patrick Field, alerted the district’s charter schools office to the lottery issues.

The district had previously raised concern about the high-performing Northeast Philadelphia school’s admission practices and demographics, which don’t match the rest of the school system’s. More than half of Franklin Towne’s student body — 54% — is white, while 23% is Latino, 12% Black, 8% multiracial, and 2% Asian.

In moving to revoke the school’s charter, the charter schools office in August found that Franklin Towne hadn’t just appeared to have excluded students from January’s lottery, but also from those in previous years — with no students accepted from five majority-Black zip codes in West and Southwest Philadelphia during at least three of the four years reviewed.

“The extremely low probability of this distribution occurring by chance further underscores the potential presence of non-random factors influencing the acceptance process,” the office said.

At the time of The Inquirer’s story in May, Franklin Towne called the allegations a “serious matter” and said it had hired an external agency to investigate.

But the school said in August that it was “blindsided” by the district’s move to revoke its charter — and said that it was “confident that we will overcome any manipulation of the facts portrayed either in the media or in public meetings” by the charter schools office. It did not say which facts it believed were manipulated.