Morgan Hill Unified School District leaders are taking aim at two local charter schools for not fulfilling their end of agreements made in some critical areas, and will provide a status report at tonight’s Board of Education meeting.
The Sept. 4 meeting, which is held at district headquarters (15600 Concord Circle), will begin with closed session at 4pm, immediately followed by public session at 6pm.
Describing them as “unresolved issues” with charter schools in the MHUSD boundaries, district staff outlined a number of problems they are facing at both Voices College-Bound Language Academies and Charter School of Morgan Hill.
Voices
The district wants to know where the $125,000 lump-sum payment made to Voices “to subsidize improvements at the Advent Site or an alternative facility location” as part of a 2016 facilities agreement went toward, according to the staff report. The district claims Voices is in breach of contract and “breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing.”
“Voices confirmed in September 2017 that no funds had been expended so the district sought additional information related to future plans at which point Voices claimed there was no time limit for using the settlement funds despite the settlement agreement being specifically for a three-year period,” according to the same report.
Voices moved from its Advent Lutheran Church location at 16870 Murphy Ave. to its current Morgan Hill school site at 610 Jarvis Drive last school year. It had originally planned to add classrooms to the old church location prior to the moving to the former Silicon Valley Flex Academy building.
In another grievance with Voices, district staff claims its charter officials have failed to notify them of any student who has been expelled or no longer enrolled in their Morgan Hill school since 2015.
“(T)he Superintendent’s office of Morgan Hill has received no notifications of any subsequent student exits Voices Charter School even though there have been student exits from Voices Charter School to Morgan Hill Schools,” according to the report.
Charter School of Morgan Hill
As for CSMH, the district states that its leaders have failed to meet with them since May 2018 to square away one final section of the unsigned Memorandum of Understanding between the two entities.
The MOU, between the charter and its authorizer, is of vital importance for CSMH to receive funding from its Proposition 51 request to the state, according to the district report.
In another unresolved matter, the district states that the charter is “in non-compliance for failure to meet legal obligations to English Learners” since it has not provided any evidence to the district to the contrary.
A separate document attached to the online Sept. 5 agenda, titled “MHUSD and CSMH Stipulations Status,” the district states that the charter has failed to provide documents addressing its plan for “eliminating deficit spending for ongoing operating expenditures” and a balanced budget “without the use of fundraising” dollars.
“CSMH continues to budget between $300,000 and $401,300 annually in fundraising revenues,” according to the report. “The district continues to bring up concerns that inability to fundraise these levels would further exacerbate the budget deficit.”
The district, which identifies eight areas and whether the charter has fulfilled their obligations in those areas, also claims that CSMH has failed to develop and submit biannual reports on month-by-month cash flow projections and multi-year projections.
Other issues marked as “not completed” by CSMH include:
•Producing “common and fair data reporting protocols”;
•Ensuring staff is “not misassigned” and CLAD compliant;
•Developing a background check process for parent volunteers;
•Placing a MHUSD representative on the CSMH Board of Directors; and
•Executing the “MOU mutually developed and adopted by MHUSD Board of Trustees.”
The one are marked as “completed” is the installment of a weighted lottery system that gives a 2 to 1 preference to Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Students and English Learners.” However, “data shows that work to achieve a more diverse student population has not made any significant advancement toward the goal as the lottery is not aggressively increasing the percentage of students in need,” according to the report.
