Led a K-12 Charter School during the COVID Pandemic and Found a Future for Open Doors Community School
Open Doors Community School reached out to Raise the Bar Consulting during the 2021 school year. Faced with an imminent leadership departure, financial constraints and poor academic achievement, the school was at a crossroads: it had recently emerged from COVID-19, with safety protocols still in place, but it was not thriving. The charter school, once the vision of a former executive at Arizona Youth Partnership, had outgrown its alignment with the nonprofit organization that started the school and held the charter. Jennifer joined them as the Interim Principal and Superintendent of this one-school district with the goal of finding the best future for the school.
When she took the helm, it was clear that the school was struggling financially, academic achievement was low, and staff were exhausted and demoralized from the years of leadership instability coupled with the social unrest of the pandemic. The school faced multiple potential violations, was officially on state-invoked School Improvement, and was planning to enter the next school year with a $400,000 budgeted loss, unsure if it would be able to operate beyond the Christmas break.
Leading a school that recently emerged from the pandemic was not easy. The school lost a beloved member to COVID19 in the summer of 2021, after Jennifer joined the group and just three weeks before it reopened for the 2022 school year – and he was the person who usually readied the student computers and all the facilities for opening. So, Jennifer created a crisis response plan to open the school. Daily, Jennifer, the other administrators and the teaching team navigated parent’s frustrations with vaccination, quarantine and closure procedures. Many parents yearned for leadership who would abandon these protocols quickly, whether or not they were mandated by the state.
In addition to implementing a crisis response plan to reopen the school for the 2022 school year, Jennifer conducted an organizational assessment to identify turnaround opportunities to stabilize the school finances, with the goal of stretching our resources to cover a full school year while she led an administrative and leadership group to review options for the future of the school. Committed to ensuring that the school provided a quality of education for all students and fulfilled special education legal obligations, Jennifer made some necessary but unpopular decisions for the sake of school solvency: adding more aides to better support classrooms, modifying employee benefits to reduce exorbitant administrative costs, and dismissing programs and educators whose solutions proved ineffective. She onboarded new reading intervention programming, a new special education consulting service, new scaffolded curriculum for English, math and social studies, and ensured funds were available for school field trips, committed to ensuring that the children had a robust academic experience despite the conditions the school faced.
Shortly after the school opened for the new school year, we went to work on a discovery process to determine the future of the school. Potential options included remaining open as-is, merging with another school, or closing altogether. It became clear that merging would potentially provide the best option for long-term viability, and two potential charter school district partners were identified who had an interest in acquiring the school. But a conventional acquisition would not be easy: because of the school’s academic and financial status, few partners would acquire the school because of a state regulation that would result in a grade reduction for any district that embraced the school as its own. So Jennifer worked with an identified charter group and the Arizona Board of Charter Schools, as well as the school board and the parent nonprofit’s board of directors, to find a creative solution: Open Doors Community School would close on June 30, and a new school would open in its place on July 1 to start the 2023 school year, complete with a seamless transition of leasing, retention of staff and educators, purchase of all school equipment and offerings, and the appropriate sharing of school data, led and implemented by Jennifer and her team.
During this time, Jennifer and her team ran the day-to-day operations of the school, ensuring that all academic offerings were provided, children were safe and nurtured in their care, special education interventions were implemented for the 30% of the students who had IEPs, and parents’ concerns were addressed. The situation was tenuous and uncertain until late in the year when we knew that the “unconventional merger” would happen.
The new school, La Paloma Academy Marana, opened as a member of the ACDC Charter Group, with new leadership, programming, and support for the school community, continuing a strong tradition of charter school education serving rural North Marana and southern Pinal County. Jennifer and her administration completed full school and organizational closure to ready for the new school.
Against all odds, and far from the financial deficits and academic failure the school faced, the school closed on a high note: not only did the new school open, but Open Doors became moderately solvent – it ended the school year with an $80,000 profit, a far cry from the $400,000 loss it began with and enough funding to pay for the remaining costs needed to close the school. And by the time the state of Arizona released school grades the following fall, and on the backdrop of so much transition and uncertainty, we somehow had managed to improve all academic achievement scores, raising the school to a “C” Grade for the first time in a few years. Most of the teachers, staff and students returned for the new year to enroll at La Paloma Marana and remain there today. A result we consider a huge success.