"There were so many growing pains in the beginning," says current executive director Mark Hyatt, who is retiring at the end of the year.
DeHoff didn't return phone calls from Westword.
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Marcos Martinez opened Ricardo Flores Magón Academy in 2007.
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Claudia Mitchell was fired from her job at the academy in 2009.
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But the blame isn't totally his. For years, boardmembers argued about whether the institute should act as an authorizer, approving schools and checking to make sure students were learning and finances were in order, or whether it should also take on the responsibilities of a school district, such as doling out federal special-education funds, running the school lunch program and stepping in when schools were in trouble.
"We went back and forth between being an authorizer and a district," says Craig Bowman, a retired schoolteacher and newspaper columnist who was appointed as one of the founding boardmembers. "If we're the authorizer, to whom do they go to report?"
The board wound up deciding it should be both, Bowman and Medler recall, and DeHoff hired staff to carry out the district functions.
But when Hyatt took over in February 2010, he realized that the institute had overspent about $200,000, mostly on staff. "This was at the crisis stage," Hyatt says. "But I said, 'We're going to make lemonade out of lemons here. And we're going to use this to get rid of the people who need to move on.... We were going to go from good to great — well, we weren't even good. Okay, we were going to go from poor to good, and then next year, we were going to go from good to great."
Hyatt slashed the staff, balanced the budget and shut down a satellite office in Grand Junction that was administering special-education services to the schools in that region. For a while, the cutbacks made things worse. Hyatt and a bare-bones staff struggled, and failed, to get the state and federal dollars that are the lifeblood of charter schools to them on time. "We were in survival mode," Hyatt says.
In March of this year, things started to turn around, Hyatt says. The budget inched back into the black, and Hyatt was able to make a few hires, including Hemming and a sharp new chief financial officer, whom he sees as key to resurrecting the institute. The organization also won about $100,000 in grants from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers to hire consultants to write a strategic plan for the institute and help carry it out. The plan, completed in July, points out several of the same shortcomings that Hyatt noticed, including the institute's identity crisis. "They were trying to be everything to everybody, and they were not doing anything all that well," Hyatt says.
Although the institute still has to carry out some district-like function by law, it has scaled back. And Hemming and others are now working to create procedures and tools that should have been in place years ago, including a more robust annual performance report that will track schools' test scores, finances and safety.
That will matter more as schools' charters come up for renewal, which generally happens every three to five years. Not renewing a charter has been the main way the institute has punished bad schools in the past; in 2010, the board closed an online school that couldn't enroll or keep enough students. Its biggest embarrassment, however, was probably its involvement in the Cesar Chavez School Network. The institute was the authorizer of two schools in the five-school network when a scandal over money and test scores caused the ouster of the network's founder. The schools, now called GOAL Academy and Scholars to Leaders Academy, have since separated from the network.
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With RFMA's charter set to expire, the school has plans to reapply to the institute, as well as apply to Adams 50. Applications to the institute are due by December 12. Staff will review them and present a recommendation to the board, which is scheduled to vote on RFMA's renewal, along with two others, on February 21. Adams 50's process is less formal. "I'm working with Marcos to make sure to get the loose ends tied up," says James Duffy, the district's chief operations officer, of RFMA's application. He expects the district's board will vote in January. Martinez says that although he's grateful to the institute for giving the school its start, he's eager to be part of a resource-rich district. "We're in their back yard," he says. "We want to be part of their community."
Duffy says the academy's application contains no red flags: "They have shown that their instructional model has been successful with their students." He also notes that their finances seem to be in good order. "We're not above saying we bet on the wrong horse early on," he says about the fact that Adams 50 rejected the school in 2006.
But Duffy didn't know about the pending lawsuits or the complaints before talking with Westword. The charter school institute, meanwhile, was aware of the landlord lawsuit, but not of Mitchell's. RFMA also failed to tell the district about its plans to expand the school to Brighton and Cheyenne, Wyoming. "The renewal will take into consideration the entire body of evidence," Hyatt says. "I mean everything and anything."
