Late last month, Concrete Roses STEM Academy, a charter school in my hometown of Charlotte, abruptly shut down just 20 days after opening its doors for the first time, sending kids scrambling to find a new school less than a month into the year. This came after North Carolina officials froze the school’s access to state money due to serious irregularities. School founder Cedric Stone subsequently admitted that Concrete Roses–touted as the first science/technology/engineering/math (STEM) charter magnet in Charlotte–had been severely under-financed from the beginning. While it doesn’t say much that the best-case scenario was that Stone was in over his head, I’d hoped that’s all that had happened. Unfortunately, it looks like this situation is worse than that. Far worse. It looks like Concrete Roses used part of the money it got from the state before it closed on September 19 to make payments on a car, but can’t find enough money to pay teachers and staff.
According to WBTV in Charlotte, state officials who are sifting through the wreckage of Concrete Roses found evidence that the school used some of the $285,170 it received from the state to make two $629 payments on a company-issued Chevrolet for Stone. However, the teachers and staff have yet to receive their final paychecks. They were supposed to get them on September 30, but the money never arrived. Even worse, according to The Charlotte Observer, at least one staffer, former cafeteria manager Tamika Frye, claims to have never been paid at all. Frye resigned in August. A few days after Concrete Roses closed, she asked Stone about her back pay. Frye says Stone told her that since the school was shut down, there wasn’t any money available. Frye doesn’t know what to do, especially since she has bills to pay and kids to feed.
Frye isn’t the only one who is trying to keep her head above water. Former science teacher Beth Berg told WBTV that several of her colleagues are unable to make ends meet, and at least one of them could end up on the street unless he gets his back pay soon. Even that may not be enough for teachers and staffers to keep the wolves from their doors for long. Berg told The Observer that since the state has no record of Concrete Roses, she and her colleagues can’t collect unemployment pay while looking for work. This is likely related to one reason the state froze Concrete Roses’ funding; according to a letter announcing the freeze, the school hadn’t filed state-required expense reports for July and August.
Stone has literally run out of options to get the staff paid. Principal Marvin Bradley says the school has no assets to sell, and both the state and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools have refused to give Concrete Roses another penny. Alexis Schauss, the director of business for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, whose signature is on the letter that froze Concrete Roses’ funds, bluntly told WBTV that the school should have enough money to pay its teachers, especially considering that it drew more state money than its enrollment would have normally allowed. The school had originally planned for an enrollment of 300 students in grades K-12, but only 126 students actually enrolled.
The school was fraught with other problems as well. Berg said that the school didn’t have Wi-Fi access, making it impossible for her to stream any lessons or do research on campus. She also said that many of her fellow teachers didn’t have textbooks or teacher support. In a colossal understatement, she said she and her fellow teachers were “handicapped” in their efforts to “do the very best we could for our students.” This seems to confirm earlier reports of the curriculum being incomplete and kids coming home without books or homework. In other words–this school did not even begin to fulfill its promise of giving a hand up to disadvantaged kids.
I’m trying to keep an open mind about charter schools, but this situation reveals that there is something very wrong with the system. Based on what is known so far, it did not have adequate funding, curriculum, materials or infrastructure. Now it looks like that at an absolute minimum it did not have adequate financial oversight. Any one of those instances should have been a huge red flag. All of these at the same time? This school should have never been allowed to open. To be sure, based on what is known, Stone is at the very least staring down the barrel of one whopper of a lawsuit; indeed, Berg says she and other teachers are seriously considering calling in a lawyer. But if the holes in the system that made this travesty possible in the first place aren’t plugged, we may be seeing more repeats of this in the future.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC at Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
Edited by D.H.
