The Fountain Square Academy charter school will close in 2012 because of poor academic performance, Mayor Greg Ballard announced Friday.
The school, serving 285 students in Grades 7-12 at 1615 Barth Ave., would be just the second mayor-sponsored charter forced to shut down, and it would be the first time a charter school was closed based solely on academic performance.
In 2005, Flanner House Higher Learning Center was closed by then-Mayor Bart Peterson for academic and management problems.
The mayor’s office approves charters for seven years. After six years, each is evaluated for a seven-year renewal.
Five other schools — Fall Creek Academy, Charles A. Tindley Accelerated School, Indianapolis Metropolitan High School, KIPP Academy and the Southeast Neighborhood School of Excellence — won approval to continue operating Friday.
Over its six years, Fountain Square Academy had “not lived up to the performance standards” of the mayor’s office, Ballard said. He said he hoped a new operator would take over the school, which has one year left on its contract, and continue serving the neighborhood by seeking to charter a new school.
“People know we are going to hold schools accountable for their efforts, but we are not casting the kids aside,” Ballard said.
Kevin Teasley, president of the Indianapolis-based GEO Foundation, which operates the school, called the decision “arbitrary” and Ballard’s decision-making process “mysterious,” arguing that Fountain Square’s test scores and other academic success measures are as good as, and in some instances better than, those of other mayor-sponsored charters.
“The public deserves a clear understanding of when a school is clearly failing,” he said. “Which data points should we be looking at? Which one is the tipping point to cause closure? I don’t think anyone has a clue which one is most important.”
Teasley said Fountain Square’s governing board already has sent a letter to Ball State University, Indiana’s other major charter school sponsor, saying it would seek a new charter for the school there.
Fall Creek Academy, which won renewal and praise from Ballard for its academic gains last year, also is run by GEO. Three other GEO-run charters in Gary and South Bend are sponsored by Ball State.
At 38 percent, Fountain Square had about the same percentage of students passing both parts of the state ISTEP test last year as two schools that had their charters renewed or extended — SENSE and the KIPP Academy. Its percentages of students with high growth in English and math were about the same as KIPP and considerably better than SENSE.
Karega Rausch, who directs Ballard’s charter school office, said Fountain Square Academy failed to meet “virtually all” 22 of the measures used to evaluate schools.
“We don’t do the comparison game,” he said. “We look at the particulars of each school relative to the performance standards set out in our performance framework.”
Rausch said there was no political agenda behind the plan to close Fountain Square.
“The mayor has been consistent about the necessity to have high-quality charter schools,” he said. “No other charter in the mayor’s portfolio has underperformed as consistently as Fountain Square Academy has.”
Students at the school said Friday they were disappointed by Ballard’s decision.
Jysicca Kingery, a senior, already attends classes at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and will continue there for college in the fall on scholarship. She said that when she arrived at Fountain Square in seventh grade after attending Indianapolis Public Schools, she was failing math. She credits Fountain Square teacher Emily Johnson for staying late with her after school to help her conquer her struggles, starting with long division.
“She sat with me for hours and hours, helping me learn the basics of algebra,” she said. “Now it is much easier if I apply myself the way she is teaching me to.”
Kingery said she has seen positive change in the last three years at Fountain Square. She wants to stay involved in the school after graduation because of the family atmosphere.
Johnson, who came to the school last year through the Teach for America public service organization, said Ballard’s view “doesn’t jell” with her impression of the school.
“It’s an incredibly dedicated staff that stays late and comes in early,” she said. “The academic results have been improving since I got here.”
He said he was sure he had picked a good school when he was assigned to study the effects of pollution on Pleasant Run creek for science. He and his classmates took water samples, tested for contaminants and studied animal bones and footprints they found along the way.
“You kind of feel like a scientist,” he said. “It’s not something you would think about doing at a regular school. You’re not just making a poster board or a slide show.”
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