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Outside of a sign on the door that the school is permanently closed, all signage at St. Cloud Preparatory Academy was removed shortly after the school year ended. The school has surrendered its charter. Outside of a sign on the door that the school is permanently closed, all signage at St. Cloud Preparatory Academy was removed shortly after the school year ended. The school has surrendered its charter. PHOTO/TERRY LLOYD -
Outside of a sign on the door that the school is permanently closed, all signage at St. Cloud Preparatory Academy was removed shortly after the school year ended. The school has surrendered its charter. PHOTO/TERRY LLOYD
A second Osceola County charter school in the past three months has had issues that required Osceola County School Board action.
But, unlike American Classical Charter Academy, whose charter was revoked by the School Board because of its financial and regulatory issues, St. Cloud Preparatory Academy asked for the Board to revoke its license, which was granted at the June 7 meeting.
School officials said that, without being able to secure a long-term lease with a new landlord, who bought the property late in 2021 and owns the land at the south end of Budinger Avenue near Nolte Road and the buildings on it, the SCPA board voted to close the school and surrender its charter.
The school had offered to use the funds it had left to cover salary and insurance for teachers through mid-August, and told them that back in May. But they then discovered the fiscal year of the School District ended on June 30, and that pay would have to end that day instead.
A number of SCPA teachers attended the School Board meeting, and confirmed that. Taking up the issue as an emergency item, SCPA officials worked with a school district attorney to hammer out an agreement for the school to pay out what funds it has left over, beyond what is allotted by the district, to pay teachers what they can into August.
“We were never going to not pay them,” SCPA board member Mike Fisher said. “I spoke to several teachers at the meeting, and they understood. Paying out in August is what we’d normally do, but this year we don’t have a ‘next year’ and funds for it.”
He said the board wanted to act quickly enough for parents to find new schools for students ahead of the next school year in August, and for teachers and staff to find new positions.
After a social media campaign to malign the school and its executive director Jonathan D’Amico, the SCPA Board Chairman Tammy Raz wrote another letter to the School District, obtained by the News-Gazette. In it, she noted D’Amico had been a “fierce ally” for the school, it had been “scraping by” for a number of years since opening in 2014 but still met all financial obligations, and that the school had rejected a short-term lease offer from the new owner, who gave indications “there were multiple offers for the property already on the table, and they reserved the right to sell the property at will whenever they choose.”
Raz also addressed the payment issue.
“Inaccurate information was given on the length of funding the school would be provided and for how long SCPA could pay teachers,” she said. “This was neither a malicious lie or an intentional misrepresentation — merely not enough time and information to provide an accurate statement.”
Fisher said the board was offered a one-year lease, with the owner reserving the right to sell the property at any time.
“What if that had happened in November? We’d have to send the kids and teachers scrambling to find a new school in the middle of the year,” he said. “We didn’t take the one-year offer, because how does that look to parents, telling them we’ll only be there one year and then they’ll have to find another school — again? We couldn’t, in clear conscience, do that.”
Fisher said the SCPA board began looking for bonds to buy the school itself in 2020, but then the pandemic hit, which also corresponded with a 20 percent drop in students (from 535 to 416), which affects its district funding allotment.
He also said the school looked into moving to other Osceola County locations — including where American Classical Charter had been — but nothing was affordable, or available to fit SCPA’s needs.
As of late last week’s, the school’s website and Facebook page had been taken down. Fisher said that, promptly after the school year ended, the District emptied it of equipment.
