‘It’s the cruelest thing ever for a child’: One parent on the Delaware STEM Academy closure

Ronda Dougherty is scrambling to find a new school for her grandson to attend in the fall.
She’s one of the families that enrolled for Delaware STEM Academy (DSA), a New Castle charter school that was shut down last week — before it even opened — due to a number of factors like low enrollment and questioned financial viability. The school had enrolled more than 120 ninth- and 10th-graders, according to school leadership, and was recruiting students up until the last moment before the Department of Education’s decision to revoke its charter.
Dougherty enrolled her son at a DSA open house one week before the school was shut down. When reached by phone, she told Technical.ly that she was very upset about the news and felt misled by DSA’s leadership.
“I’m very disappointed with the school,” she said. “What they were telling me, it seemed like a fantastic school. I had no idea what was going on.”
Dougherty said that nobody had informed her that the state’s Charter School Accountability Committee was reviewing DSA and that it might not open. In fact, she was under the impression that the school had been open last year.
DSA Executive Director Brett Taylor disputed this in an email last week, saying that leadership had been discussing DSA’s tenuous standing “with all parents and students when they attend the open houses” and keeping parents up to date with the review process.
Dougherty said she’s particularly upset that the school leadership failed to explain that enrolling her child would improve DSA’s chances of opening, as one of CSAC’s primary concerns was DSA’s low enrollment rate. This decision to support DSA by enrolling students, she feels, should have been up to the parents.
“How dare they have the audacity to have me come in there and be expecting my child to come to their school, when they didn’t even know if they were going to open or not?” she said. “The school is just like, ‘Oh, well!’ No, it’s not ‘Oh, well.’ It’s the cruelest thing ever for a child.”
The Department of Education said it would assist students in finding new schools. The charter school office began personally reaching out to each family earlier this week, said Alison May, public information officer of the state agency. They can either return to their home district schools or attend another district or charter school, provided that it has openings. Trouble is, it’s unclear which charter and district schools have available seats, as May said that the Department of Education is still in the process of collecting this information.
We reached out to several New Castle County charter schools and two had openings: Freire Charter School in Wilmington and MOT Charter School in Middletown, which is almost at capacity, said executive assistant Ellen Greene. Early College High School @ DSU in Kent County also has between 10 and 20 open seats.
We reached out to DSA Board President Ted Williams to find out if DSA leadership would help families find new schools but Williams declined to comment until the next board meeting was held.
It’s not always easy for families to bounce back after a school closes. In Philadelphia, in 2014, thousands of students were unaccounted for after the School District closed 24 schools and made massive budget cuts.