A charter school run solely by the city teachers union could be shut down after state education officials identified a slew of serious academic, financial and management failures.
The State University of New York’s Board of Trustees will vote this morning on whether to renew or cancel the charter for the UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn.
A report produced by SUNY reviewers zeroes in on the K-12 school’s abysmal performance in the middle grades, overspending that put its projected deficit at more than $2.8 million, and staff complaints about chronic textbook shortages.
“The overall performance of the middle school, if analyzed separately, would not meet SUNY renewal criteria,” their report says.
In a rare move, the reviewers did not make a final recommendation to SUNY on whether the charter should be renewed, because the academic results were notably better at the elementary- and high-school levels.
The UFT represents teachers at more than a dozen charter schools and co-manages at least one, but this is the only charter school in the city that’s run solely by the union.
It was founded in part to showcase that charter schools, which typically don’t have unionized staff, can succeed with union backing.
The report found that the charter’s board of trustees — which includes UFT President Michael Mulgrew — was overly secretive and violated the Open Meetings Law by talking about budgeting, school-status reports and other issues privately rather than in public.
It claimed special-education students were placed in settings that violated federal law; that some kids weren’t given needed English-language instruction; and that background-check information wasn’t available for five employees.
The charter, where fewer than 10 percent of eighth-graders passed the 2012 state English exams, was also forced to install a “zero-tolerance” policy against corporal punishment by teachers, the report said.
School director Shelia Evans-Tranumn took issue with some of the findings. She said that the school was in compliance with requirements for students learning English and that parents of some special-needs kids had OK’d their placement into the classes they were in.