SRC votes to close two city charter schools

The Germantown Settlement Charter School, beset by financial difficulties and under investigation by law-enforcement agencies, must shut down, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission unanimously voted yesterday.

The commission also voted to close the 212-student Renaissance Charter School in Mount Airy. Both schools have been open since 1999 and were denied five-year charter renewals.

The decisions to close the schools are the first since charter schools opened in Philadelphia in 1999.

Both schools failed to meet district requirements for academics, teacher qualifications and reporting, the SRC said.

Officials of both schools vowed to appeal. If the schools do not appeal within 30 days, they could be closed at any time after that. The district plans to send letters to parents and hold meetings to give them information about what happens next, officials said.

The Germantown charter, with 456 fifth through eighth graders in buildings on Germantown and Wayne Avenues, is in crisis, The Inquirer reported Sunday. Its test scores dramatically lag state benchmarks, dozens of vendors clamor daily for payments, and the school is threatened with eviction by a sister nonprofit created by its parent, Germantown Settlement. The school's accounts have been drained and the school has run deficits as high as $406,617, according to school and district documents.

The district inspector general investigated the school. Investigations continue by the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Pennsylvania attorney general and the state auditor.

Before the SRC's vote, Chairman Sandra Dungee Glenn detailed the school's financial problems. She said it still owed more than $200,000 to creditors as late as this summer and had been unable to pay many contractors that provided services.

Emanuel V. Freeman, president of the Germantown Settlement Charter board, in an interview last week with The Inquirer, denied any wrongdoing and vowed to keep the school open. "We will continue to appeal at every conceivable level," he said. He could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Principal Jeffrey Williams confirmed after the vote that the charter board would appeal. "It's a sad day for the students," he said. "My primary concern has always been for the students and the parents. The disruption for them is the most devastating thing. They did not ask to be involved in this."

Alana Walls, principal of the Renaissance charter, with grades six through eight, said the school would appeal to the state Charter School Appeals Board. "It's obviously very disheartening," she said.

The appeals could take several months before the state board. State courts could then be asked to intervene.

Before the votes, Dungee Glenn cited a litany of violations of charter school and state regulations: 10 items for the Renaissance school and 11 items for the Germantown charter.

They included poor academic performance, high staff turnover, failure to carry out academic programs, failure to file required reports, failure to have the required 75 percent of certified teachers, and the failure of board members to file required financial interest statements in a timely manner.

The SRC took the first step in April to close the schools and held hearings over the summer.

In addition to being president of the charter school board, Freeman is president of its parent organization, Germantown Settlement, a community-development organization with many nonprofit and for-profit subsidiaries. The U.S. Attorney's Office is conducting a separate investigation of Germantown Settlement's operations, according to people with knowledge of that probe.

No one spoke at yesterday's SRC meeting on behalf of Germantown Settlement Charter.

Walls said the Renaissance school had made "significant progress" on all fronts since she took over early this year. "We do ask that you please renew the charter so we can continue to support the students," she said. Rickeah Akins, a student at the school, also asked that it stay open. "I love my school; please don't close it," she told the SRC.

Since the first charters opened in Philadelphia, the SRC has come close to forcing four of them to close. All were granted new charters after pleading their cases.

One, the Center for Economics and Law, a high school, closed abruptly on its own in 2003 after the district said it would not renew its charter because the school was beset by high teacher turnover, had failed to give mandatory state tests to 10th graders one year, and had been rocked by allegations of serious financial mismanagement.