A Colorado charter school network in December fired the management group that helped it launch four schools across the state, triggering a chaotic series of events that included the dismissal of more than 300 employees, swift action to rehire all staff under a new management group and, now, a potential lawsuit.
Ascent Classical Academy Charter Schools — the governing board over charter schools serving nearly 2,000 students in Lone Tree, Brighton, Windsor and Grand Junction — terminated its contract early with management organization Ascent Classical Academies, which is a Golden-based nonprofit with a similar name that establishes and operates charter schools.
Both the governing board and parents say the schools have faced multiple challenges with ACA over the past six years since their first school began operating in Lone Tree, including high turnover among school leaders and teachers and debates over what curriculum to use. The board in September unanimously voted to end its contract with ACA on June 30, 2024, “contingent upon continued cooperation by ACA,” minutes from a Sept. 26 board meeting show. Rob Williams, the charter school network’s temporary president who has long served as the board chair and treasurer, told The Colorado Sun that the board decided to sever ties sooner.
“We sped that up,” Williams said. “We didn’t feel like we were going to make it to the end of the year because they weren’t cooperating.”
When the governing board in November decided to pull funding from ACA beginning in January, the management organization “was left with no choice but to layoff its school level staff mid-year,” Derec Shuler, executive director of the organization, wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun.
That meant that 313 employees across the four campuses — which educate more than 1,950 students in grades K-12 along with nearly 230 additional students in a home school enrichment program — were out of a job at the end of December.
“Our desire from the beginning was to ensure any terminations would have minimal impact on students, which is why we planned transitions take place in the summer,” Shuler wrote. “This unnecessary and untimely mid-year transition will have impacts on students that we hope are handled to provide for the best experience for families.”
But Williams, who has a daughter at the Lone Tree campus, says neither students nor teachers are feeling any effects since the governing board hired Minga Education Group to take on some of the responsibilities formerly held by ACA. Minga Education Group rehired all school staff members and many of the home office employees within the charter school network so there was no disruption to their employment, according to Williams.
The board also circulated a letter to parents and staff in November explaining its plan to transition to Minga Education Group starting in January. That letter reiterated the board’s plan to move all employees over to the new management group.
“This should be invisible to families and the students especially,” said Kim Gilmartin, a co-founder of the schools who previously worked for ACA and left last June and is now consulting the governing board. “The curriculum will stay the same. They will continue to get the same level and quality of education that they always had.”
ACA alleges that the governing board breached its contract with the company, including by deciding to stop paying them in January without a formal board vote or notice to terminate their agreement earlier than June 30, Shuler wrote. ACA said it would file a lawsuit this week against the governing board, likely in federal court.
Williams maintains there was no breach.
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“We have followed the contract with them,” Williams said, declining to comment further because of “threatened litigation.”
He also declined to cite specific reasons for the board’s decision to cut ties with ACA because of potential litigation.
Shuler questioned how the governing board selected Minga Education Group as its new partner, saying he was aware that the board was going to issue a request for proposal and invite ACA to participate. He said he never saw the board go through with a public process and added that the Colorado charter schools will lose their licenses to the Ascent name due to the alleged contract breaches.
Williams responded that the board did not issue a formal request for proposal but asked groups including ACA to submit proposals and interviewed multiple organizations. He said the Colorado charter schools will continue to use the Ascent name, citing the board’s contract with ACA.
The contract held between Ascent Classical Academy of Douglas County and ACA states that “the name ‘Ascent Classical Academy of Douglas County’ shall be a trade name of the school, and the school shall have the right to use the (name) after termination of this agreement without additional compensation to Ascent.’”
Why does a charter school need a management organization?
Charter schools are public schools managed by outside nonprofit operators that establish a performance contract with an authorizer — a school district, or in Colorado, the Colorado Charter School Institute. The contract gives charter schools more flexibility than traditional public schools over how they educate kids, but they are still subject to the same standards and assessments as traditional public schools.
Not all charter schools rely on a third-party management organization with more charter schools in Colorado running on their own rather than with outside help, according to Terry Croy Lewis, executive director of the Colorado Charter School Institute. The statewide charter school authorizer acts as an independent agency under the state education department.
Charter schools that opt to bring on a management organization in some cases delegate back office responsibilities like human resources, hiring employees, managing payroll, bookkeeping and budgeting, Croy Lewis said.
A management organization has no authority over charter schools, Croy Lewis noted.
The authorizer, which holds a contract with the governing board, oversees the schools’ operations, academics and finances, evaluating schools each year and lending different levels of support in areas like school finance, student programs and data submissions, she said.
Meanwhile, the governing board acts as the school board for the charter schools, setting benchmarks for academics, enrollment, finances and spending and holding each school accountable for hitting expectations, Williams said.
The Colorado Charter School Institute has supported Ascent Classical Academy schools and the governing board throughout its transition to a new management organization, making sure the schools had what they needed to submit enrollment numbers to the state education department during Colorado’s annual count of students in October.
The governing board has the right to select which management company best fits its needs and to switch companies if a particular company is not aligned with the direction of the schools, Croy Lewis said.
“We’ve really stressed strongly that the board needs to have strong oversight of any education management organization they work with, that they need to hold them accountable and they need to evaluate them on a year-to-year basis to ensure they are getting the services that they have spelled out in the contract,” she said.
The governing board of Ascent Classical Academy schools has worked with ACA to create cost efficiencies across the four schools, Williams said, with the management organization handling day-to-day operations of schools, helping hire staff as well as making sure that employees get paid, that the schools are compliant with HR policies and that the schools are meeting requirements detailed in their charter with the Colorado Charter School Institute, for example.
Some management organizations promote a specific type of curriculum, which has been a sticking point between the governing board and ACA. The schools use a curriculum affiliated with Hillsdale College, a small Christian college in southern Michigan focused on classical liberal arts.
ACA no longer wanted to partner with Hillsdale College, Williams said, and he’s not sure why. The board explicitly directed the management organization to stick with the curriculum at public meetings for many months, he added.
ACA spokesperson Amy Willis said ACA is not opposed to partnering with Hillsdale College for curriculum. However, the college’s K-12 Education Office wanted to sign an agreement with ACA “through which ACA’s larger operations would be negatively impacted,” Willis wrote in a text message to The Colorado Sun. She declined to talk about specific details of the agreement, explaining that “the terms of the proposed agreement are not public.”
The governing board also was unhappy with persistent turnover among its schools, including among headmasters, Williams added, noting that the Lone Tree school had two headmasters in the course of one particular school year.
A “big red flag”
Centennial mother Annie Kaess was among the parents who helped found Ascent Classical Academy of Douglas County in Lone Tree, the first Ascent Classical Academy charter school in Colorado. Kaess said she walked in parades to promote the charter school.
Four of her six children attend the school, which she was drawn to because of its focus on classical education — a liberal arts-based approach to education that focuses on critical thinking as well as studying classic literature, history and philosophy and building moral character.
“We knew there were going to be a lot of bumps, and so we gave a lot of grace for the first three or four years,” Kaess said.
But when the school was still “limping along” a few years after it opened, Kaess said, she began asking questions. She was particularly troubled by the constant churn of staff, including headmasters and teachers, as well as the decision of other families to leave, including families who had advocated alongside her for the charter school to launch.
“To me, that was the big red flag,” Kaess said. “Why did we keep having this much turnover and this much instability at a school that people fought to get open?”
She relayed her concerns to the board, urging board members to hold ACA accountable and ensure they were delivering on services they had promised. She also signed a parent petition in the fall pushing for the charter school network to remain affiliated with Hillsdale College.
She now supports the board in shifting away from ACA.
“As a management organization of a school that claims to put kids first,” Kaess said, “I always wanted them to focus more on the success of their school, not just on academic scores but the health of the school as a whole for the longevity of the school. And it seemed like they were more focused on the growth of their network than the health of their school.”
ACA has continued to try to expand, including through a failed attempt to open a school in Boulder, the Boulder Daily Camera reported.
Shuler, ACA’s executive director, wrote in an email to The Colorado Sun, that the management group will continue trying to add to its footprint of schools across the country.
The organization “will lose some economies of scale in the short run as we shift to other opportunities in the Rockies, Carolinas, and other states,” he wrote, “but ACA has an opportunity to rebuild quickly and with better models of governance and operations.”