RIVERDALE — Officials at Christian Heritage School have announced to parents that they are selling the elementary school building to a charter school and ceasing element-ary education as early as this year.
“We were feeling like we needed to do something with our real estate, either a rental, a lease or a sale of a property in lieu of a large donor to take us through the year,” said interim headmaster Steve Diehl.
The school laid off 12 employees midyear to try to compensate for the budget crisis, he said, but it wasn’t enough to close the $400,000 deficit.
Good Foundations Academy has a lease-to-own contract with the school for the elementary building and the adjacent administration building, 5120 S. 1050 West.
The Legislature has approved funding for the charter school for the 2011-12 school year, but school officials are asking for the funding to be moved up to allow for an August opening.
“The terms just seemed favorable for everybody,” Diehl said. “They will have a full-operating school building; we will have a renter. It will cover a lot of our expenses.”
But not everyone is excited about the sudden change.
Alicia Purdy’s son, who is in the fourth grade, recently started attending CHS after a move from New York and a transfer from another local school.
She said a charter school isn’t an option for them, and this will cause her son to move to a fourth school in two years.
She said many parents were angry after the announcement last week.
“The parents were very upset. There is a lot of negative feedback. I have not heard positive from anyone whatsoever.”
Purdy believes the school board was rooting for parents to keep their children at the charter school after this year, which she said was not a desirable option for her.
“You lose the ability to teach what you believe,” she said. “They pushed very hard for us to put our kids in the charter school, which is not going to happen.”
Diehl said the only other feasible option for the school would be to have a donor pay off the balance on the school mortgage of $3.8 million.
“There’s some anger (with the parents) about the decision. We’ve tried to communicate that the other options aren’t very helpful. They aren’t very good,” he said. “I think, once things settle, they’ll realize they can have the kind of values, the kind of education they intend to have, tuition-free, in the same location they are used to coming to.”
Elizabeth Tracy, who has had her three children in CHS for the past seven years, said she is one of many parents supporting the move to a charter school.
“I’m one of those parents that have given my life to CHS,” she said. “I support the change that is being made. I don’t necessarily like what’s happening, but we’re working so hard to keep our school. There’s people out there that are broken-hearted about what’s going on. This may be the only way.”
The charter school will know by mid-March whether funding will come through early for the school. The intent is to be funded for up to 464 students.
Diehl said CHS has 211 students enrolled in the elementary program and that the building will provide plenty of space for a school with twice the current enrollment.
“This is pretty amazing that this came up and moved so quickly,” he said. “Both boards have interacted well together. The hard part is, we are losing a much-loved, cherished part of the school.”
After the transition to the charter school, Diehl said, the school board will focus on improving education at the middle and high school levels.
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