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Athens converting part of school to charter, ending inmate education

Decatur Daily - 9/17/2017

Sept. 17--ATHENS -- Athens City Schools is converting part of its Athens Renaissance School to a conversion charter school, the first in Alabama, while it ends its program to educate young inmates.

The new charter school, called the Alabama Renaissance School, is a K-12 blended school for students who live outside the Tennessee Valley, said Superintendent Trey Holladay.

"There are 1,032 students now at Athens Renaissance," he said, "and probably 468 of them will come out" while converting to the new school. In a blended program, students meet one-on-one with teachers and work online from home, he said.

Holladay said the majority of these students are being served through blended or virtual education partnerships the Athens district has with Elmore County, Linden City, Marengo County and Elba City school systems. The Athens district receives about $5,000 in state funding for each of these students a year, and spends about $4,000 per student, then returns about $500 per student to those school systems, he said.

"This is the first conversion school," said Logan Searcy, an education administrator who oversees the implementation of Alabama charter schools and is the Alabama Department of Education's liaison to the Alabama Public Charter School Commission. The state also has one open startup charter school and three more startups approved, she said.

The Athens school board approved the conversion last month. A conversion charter school doesn't have to be approved by the state Charter School Commission, since Athens City Schools is a charter school authorizer, Holladay said.

School board President Russell Johnson, who supports the move, said the charter school model is a better fit for that program.

"It will give us more flexibility. We can be more innovative in scheduling," among other features, Johnson said. "We can't do that under the constraints we have in a public school."

The Athens Renaissance School, a K-12 school designed for nontraditional students and offering the blended education program, had grown to more than 1,000 students. "It's become a big enough body of work that we need someone else dealing" with services provided outside the Tennessee Valley, Holladay said.

School officials are now negotiating a contract with an education service provider, Integra Ventures LLC, to manage and operate services for Alabama Renaissance School. The five-year contract, which would be effective Oct. 1, will be presented to the school board for consideration at its meeting Sept. 21, Holladay said.

"I'm fully confident in this group," Holladay said. "This would allow our folks to focus on kids here."

Home-schooled students who live outside the Tennessee Valley are "a target group" for Alabama Renaissance School, Holladay said. "The Tennessee Valley is a fast-growing, dynamic area. We want to be that school system with a small-town feel, but we also want to have niche schools for families who want to have the feel of home and unique education options. This gives them that opportunity."

The Athens district's program for incarcerated youths in county jails was launched just last school year.

"We had hoped to educate kids who had no other hope for an education," Holladay said. "But the company we contracted with (Grade Results) was not fulfilling their promises to serve those kids."

The Texas-based company sued the Athens school board in May, claiming breach of contract. The company claims the system has refused to pay a fee of $4,300 for each of the 489 students that were registered in the virtual education program for incarcerated youths -- an amount of about $2.1 million -- and failed to provide services for which Grade Results paid it $80,000. The suit claims the school district received funding for 455 of those students enrolled at the district's Athens Renaissance School. The school board has denied the claims in the lawsuit.

"(The program) was just not sustainable," Holladay said last week. "It was too cost prohibitive. That's not what we signed on for."

Initially, the program started with 455 inmates, he said, "and about 200 have now come off our rolls. Some got out of jail and transferred back to their home schools, and some were not participating anymore."

Huntsville-based Pinnacle Behavioral Health Inc. later provided education services for incarcerated youths for the Athens district on a contract basis, from April 6 to July 31. Holladay said education and therapy services provided by that company would have cost about $8,400 per student for a year, while the district would have received about $5,300 per student in state funding.

"We are very disappointed" over the loss of the program, Morgan County Sheriff Ana Franklin said. "I think we were the pilot jail for this program and had the first graduate in the state complete his high school education while in our facility.

"We have had several youthful inmates that had previously dropped out of high school that now have graduated and gotten their diploma and can start preparing for a productive future when they are released from jail," she said.

Part of the sheriff's office's mission to reduce crime is to provide opportunities for inmates, when possible, to become educated, trained, employed and counseled to help prevent them from being released and returning to the same lifestyle that landed them in jail, she said.

"Education and the ability to have a skill and a way to make a living is key to reducing recidivism," Franklin said.

The Alabama Public Charter School Commission last month denied an application for a proposed statewide charter school, Teens Path to Success, which would have served county inmates 21 and younger and helped them work toward earning high school diplomas. Incarcerated youth served by the Athens district would have been transferred to that program, Holladay said. But, since the nonprofit's application was denied, he said, "We had no choice but to back out."

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