Schools selected to possibly be taken over next year revealed

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The Achievement School District announced Thursday which of 10 unaddressed Priority Schools will go through its new community input process to determine if they will officially be taken over come the 2016 school year.

WREG was told the following six schools would go through the process.

ASD Superintendent Chris Barbic said these schools were selected because they are in the bottom five percent of schools in the state, and they did not show the growth the state requires to protect them from takeover.

“It’s a good school though,” said Caldwell Guthrie Elementary parent Kenisha Kearney, shocked to hear the news.

Aspire Public Schools, Achievement Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, and Scholar Academies are the operators who expressed interest in running one or more of the schools.

WREG was told over the course of the next couple of months, the operators and communities will work to get to know each other.

“The six weeks is an open engagement period, and no final decisions have been made about any of these schools,” Barbic said.

Once the period is over in October, each operator will send in an application to the ASD for the school(s) they feel they can help the most.

The application is a protection against charters backing out prematurely, like ASD saw happen last year.

The application would be a commitment to run the school(s) if selected.

Parents and the community will also have opportunities to weigh in.

The ASD said there would be Neighborhood Advisory Councils that will “review operator applications and incorporate community input to assess the fit of interested operators.” The ASD wants parents, teachers, and others in the community to apply.

These will be a contributing factor to which operators and schools get matched together.

Want to be on the Neighborhood Advisory Council?

The ASD has set up a series of meeting at all of the Priority Schools at which all of those questions will be answered.

Barbic said if schools are not matched, they will stay with SCS for another year.

Ten schools made the list of schools eligible to join the ASD this fall.

Those schools included Carver High School, Douglass High School, Northside High School, and Westwood High School.

However these schools did not meet the criteria to enter the conversion process like the six listed above.

“We care a great deal about all of the students, teachers and staff in every one of these schools and will continue to support them and work aggressively to increase student achievement as they are going through the ASD’s community input process,” SCS said.