Pleasant View charter school community grieves, pushes back on state board’s vote to close
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
Posters, ribbons and balloons adorn the front of Capstone Classical Academy on Friday, April 3, 2020, in Pleasant View. The state school board voted unanimously to close the charter school due to financial difficulties.
PLEASANT VIEW — While coping with the isolation caused by current social distancing measures, students of Capstone Academy — and their families — are grieving the loss of their school.
Members of the Utah State Board of Education (USBE) voted unanimously at their virtual meeting Thursday afternoon to affirm a Dec. 10 decision of the Utah State Charter School Board (SCSB) to close Capstone Classical Academy. The closing comes due to the school’s financial difficulties — a result of lower-than-planned enrollment numbers, which drive school funding.
Capstone is a public charter school in its second academic year and serves students in grades 6 through 12.
“I felt hurt and damaged when I got the news that Capstone would be closing at the end of the year,” said Destiny Hughes, a sixth grader at Capstone. “I also felt like the people that did vote for it to be closed … didn’t really think about the people that they were damaging and hurting when they made that decision.”
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Destiny said, “we’re locked in our houses, and I just felt like right now was not the best time because we’re not able to go and support everyone … we’re not able to go to school and be able to be with the people that are hurting the most.”
Capstone students visited the school over the course of the day Friday to hang posters of support and leave sidewalk chalk messages for their peers and the school’s broader, tight-knit community.
They staggered their visits, so few people were there at once, and they respected social distancing, according to JoAnn Adams, a Riverdale resident who is an assistant in the school’s front office and a parent of a Capstone student who participated in the show of support on Friday.
“We are all a family (at Capstone), whether we work there or are kids there,” Adams said. ” … We are not just employees or just scholars, we are all family.”
Adams’ daughter, Laila, also described the school as a family.
“They did not seem to really care that we want our school to stay open. This school is our home, it’s our family, it’s everything to us,” said Laila Adams, a 10th grader at the school. “And they ripped it out away from us, just like that during this already hard time.”
Roy resident Cherrelle Berger — mom of Destiny and an older daughter, Trinity Hughes — said her children had struggled in the past to find a community where they belong. The school has become “a family that they’ve created,” she said.
Trinity, a 10th grader at the school, said that after she had time to process the state board’s decision, she realized she might not ever see her friends at school again, because it’s not certain yet if school closures will continue through the end of the academic year.
Trinity is also afraid of the long-term impact. While she can try to maintain those relationships after the school closes, it’s simply not the same, she said, since it’s easy to lose strong ties.
“It’ll never be the same as going to school with them and seeing them every day. … I barely talk to anybody I (went) to elementary school with, and even my junior high I went to, I talk to maybe one person that goes there out of many friends that I had,” Trinity said.
“And at Capstone, I have a really strong group of friends … if you see one of us, you see the other five of us,” she continued, “and so for us to even think about having to lose a little bit of that connection that we have is just frightening for all of us.”
Berger said her daughters’ experience has been difficult to watch as a mom.
“With staying in the house, (Destiny) didn’t even get to tell her friends goodbye when the pandemic happened,” Berger said, recalling a virtual conversation Destiny had with one of her teachers. “And my heart broke as a mom because then, after I heard the vote (Thursday), I had to go home and tell my kids that they didn’t even have a school to go back to.”
Capstone’s director, Dr. Susan Goers, underscored these sentiments in an email.
“To say that the actions of the USBE are devastating in the midst of crisis is an understatement at best,” she said.
Bryan Quesenberry, assistant attorney general and attorney for USBE, said in an email that “the COVID-19 issue was not raised by either the SCSB or by Capstone in written submissions to USBE or in argument before the panel or before USBE” — suggesting that the panel and USBE did not consider that factor since it was not presented to them.
“USBE initially heard the panel’s recommendation at its March 19 board meeting, at which time no one mentioned COVID-19,” he said. “Now, after two hearings before the SCSB, one day-long panel hearing, and two appearances before USBE, we are now hearing for the first time that Capstone should not be canceled (at the end of the school year) due to COVID-19?”
Like their children, Berger and Adams are unhappy about the timing of the decision, but they also disagree with the decision itself, they said.
They said the school had significantly increased its enrollment for next year, and the school had presented a balanced budget at its Feb. 25 hearing before a panel made up of four members of the USBE and a hearing officer.
Capstone has been receiving a significantly reduced rent payment from its landlord, and the repayment of this debt has became a sticking point in the USBE’s decision on the school’s future.
Originally scheduled to make a decision at its meeting on March 19, USBE delayed the decision in order to clarify one of the school’s payment dates for a significant sum of money. The panel met again to clarify the question and sent and addendum report to the entire board.
At the Feb. 25 hearing, Capstone said it could meet its debt obligations — incurred through reduced rent payments to its lease guarantor, Highmark — by refinancing this debt, a proposal made by Highmark on Feb. 24, the day before the hearing, the panel’s adendum states.
However, Capstone did not provide evidence at the Feb. 25 hearing that its board had accepted Highmark’s proposal, the addendum continues, so “the ultimate terms of this proposal and whether Capstone’s board would accept it are thus speculative.”
Since that time, the school sought to submit additional information to clarify these issues, Goers said.
“We were accused of trying to enter ‘other’ information, when all we were providing were the executed documents from our landlord — an executed lease that would have us meeting budget easily next year,” Goers said.
The Capstone community also sent a slew of emails to USBE members trying to clarify some of these issues, they said.
Quesenberry said that USBE, “in deciding whether to affirm or reject the SCSB decision, acted in its role as a quasi-judicial body. The Board was limited to considering evidence collected in the record made earlier by the panel (i.e. documents, audio recording, submissions to the panel by the parties). The Board was obligated to confine its analysis of the matter and its deliberations to this evidence. It would be improper for the Board to hear new evidence from Capstone supporters contained in emails from the Capstone community the day of the Board hearing.”
In response, Adams said it would be a shame to close the school on a technicality.