The commission overseeing public charter schools agreed Thursday to begin shutting down the financially strapped Halau Lokahi Public Charter School, ending a months-long struggle to keep the Hawaiian culture-based school afloat.
The nine-member state Public Charter School Commission voted 6-2 to issue a notice of revocation to the Kalihi school, representing the first step toward closing the campus. Halau Lokahi will have a 30-day window to appeal the move, but if upheld, it would be the first time a Hawaii charter has been revoked.
The commissioners also approved withholding further funding from the school with the exception of expenses needed to dissolve and close the campus. Commissioner Peter Hanohano and Vice Chairman Peter Tomozawa voted against the motion.
Tom Hutton, the commission’s executive director, who recommended the closure in light of continued insolvency, said his staff will immediately begin reaching out to parents of the school’s 114 students in grades kindergarten through 12 to help find alternatives. He said his office had already been in "quiet talks" with other Hawaiian-focused charter schools and neighborhood public schools to inquire about possible placement of Halau Lokahi students.
"As painful as a school closure decision is, the commission staff has labored mightily over a lot of months to try to see if there’s a way to get this thing turned around," Hutton said. "We’ve reached the point where we’ve given it a go and another go and another go for a long time, and it’s in the best interest of children that they find the next option."
Students had been scheduled to return from winter break Tuesday.
The commission at its December meeting asked Halau Lokahi’s governing board to come up with a financial sustainability plan over the break before deciding whether to release another round of funding to the school. School officials had also pledged to restructure the school by laying off the entire staff and hiring a smaller faculty, based on qualifications, for next semester.
Elizabeth Blake, a school improvement consultant who was named acting director of the school, said the faculty and staff had been cut to 10 from 18 after nonessential employees were laid off. She said the "super-painful" reduction would lower payroll from $721,000 a year to $298,000.
Still, the school had just one certified teacher on staff for its elementary grades and two licensed secondary special-education teachers who are assigned to the school by the Department of Education.
Blake on Thursday presented a new financial plan that called for bringing on a mainland vendor to deliver instruction online for the school’s secondary students, to be taught by certified teachers supplied by the contractor.
Under that plan, the company, K12 Inc. of Herndon, Va., also would provide $150,000 to help fund operations through the end of the school year. In return, K12 Inc., which bills itself as a for-profit education company that sells online schooling and curriculum, would require a deal to receive a percentage of future income for the remaining 2 1/2 years of Halau Lokahi’s charter contract.
"They’re putting in $150,000, so either you take the cost of closing the school or you put it on them. I’d put it on them," Blake said. "Give us a chance to go through this semester and show you that we will turn this school around. … I feel like were being nailed to the wall for other, past practices."
Blake left after the commission’s vote and did not return a message seeking comment about the revocation decision.
Hutton called the proposed plan a risky undertaking, even for a healthy school.
"This is a very different way of doing education in this school. … This discussion started two days ago, and school starts next week. That is, from our standpoint, pretty risky when you’re talking about kids," he said. "This would be a big challenge for a very highly functioning school. This school is not a highly functioning school. This is a severely challenged school on all levels, and it’s being asked to do a very, very ambitious change in how it does everything."
Charter schools are largely funded with taxpayer dollars via per-pupil funding but enjoy more autonomy than regular public schools and report to their own governing boards rather than the Board of Education. The commission awards three-year charter contracts for the schools to operate, with annual academic, financial and organizational performance requirements.
Halau Lokahi’s money troubles came to light at the end of last school year, when it ran out of money and stopped paying its staff and rent. It ended that year with a $502,000 deficit.
In June the commission required the school to replace its governing board and longtime director and founder, Laara Allbrett, and come up with a financial plan to carry it through this school year, before allowing it to reopen. But the campus again faced a shortfall as enrollment fell below projections.
Most commission members took issue with the proposed online schooling as being too big a shift from Halau Lokahi’s approved academic plan. Some voiced concern that K12 Inc. has never worked with a Hawaiian-focused school before.
Of the 34 public charter schools statewide, roughly half are Hawaiian-focused schools, where instruction and learning are grounded in Native Hawaiian values, knowledge, beliefs, practices and language.
Commissioner Kalehua Krug said he was worried that Hawaiian culture would no longer be embedded in every lesson and subject under the K12 Inc. deal.
"It seems like it’s being done strictly to keep a school open," said Krug, a faculty member with the University of Hawaii at Manoa College of Education. "If K12 teaches the class, the Hawaiian perspective sits on the side. The focus of the course is no longer a Hawaiian focus. … I’ve seen this before in many other places, and I’ve experienced it myself, and it changed the essence of the school."
If the approximately $250,000 in per-pupil funding withheld from the school last month is applied to its outstanding debts, the state would still need to come up with about $88,000 to pay off all debts, Hutton said.
Amid the financial scrutiny, the school has come under investigation by the state attorney general’s office for suspected money laundering and theft. The office executed a search warrant at the school in November, seizing financial and personnel records as well as computers. Soon after, school co-director Callei Allbrett, founder Laara Albrett’s daughter, was put on administrative leave.
