The details seemed rather mundane. A municipal spat involving a lease, a city construction project and a charter preschool educating 100 toddlers.
“It’s the epitome of what is happening not just in Washington, but all across the country,” said Jeanne Allen, CEO of the Center for Education Reform, a national charter advocacy organization.
AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter, a popular charter network of preschools, had leased city-owned space for about five years on the tennis courts of a Southwest Washington middle school, operating in trailers.
Everyone agrees that the arrangement at Jefferson Middle School was always intended to be temporary; AppleTree had signed a lease saying it would vacate the property at the end of this month.
AppleTree says it needs a few more months on the site. But D.C. officials say the city needs to move forward with long-planned renovations at Jefferson and cannot give the preschool a reprieve.
Now, AppleTree has nowhere to go for the upcoming academic year, and local and national charter advocates have latched on to the dispute, citing it as another example of local governments being inhospitable to charter schools.
The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post editorial boards weighed in, lambasting D.C. officials, including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), for not helping the school. Big-name charter advocates have spoken out against what they view as the latest snub to charter schools in a city they believe is becoming more unfriendly to them.
The D.C. government is also considering proposals to make charter schools subject to open meetings and public records laws — proposals opposed by many charter school proponents. In May, the Bowser administration released a statement warning the board that governs charter schools that opening more charters could hurt the city’s existing schools.
The D.C. government has historically been considered friendly to charter schools, and on the other side of the debate, advocates of the traditional public school system argue that the city is not doing enough to protect its system of neighborhood schools. Many neighborhood schools in low-income areas of the city are facing declining enrollment — and strained budgets — amid increased competition from charter and application schools.
“If Mayor Bowser won’t find space for well-performing charters such as AppleTree, maybe Congress — which passed the reform that led to charters opening in the district — should take steps to make it harder for city officials to jerk these charter kids around,” the Journal’s editorial board wrote.
Across the country, charter schools are clamoring for space and asking city governments to give them leases for vacant buildings. The problem is particularly acute in big cities, where the charter sector is robust and real estate is in demand and expensive.
In the District, charter schools receive additional funding for facilities but are responsible for obtaining and paying for their own real estate.
AppleTree said it could not find an alternative location in Southwest Washington — an increasingly expensive and trendy part of the city — until December, months after the start of the school year.
The dispute between AppleTree and the District comes as the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, an advocacy group, is running an advertising campaign calling on the city to rent empty facilities to charter schools.
In June, Bowser announced plans to grant a lease on a vacant school campus in Southeast Washington. That could pave the way for a charter school to take over a public school building for the first time in the five years Bowser has been mayor.
Ramona Edelin, the executive director of the D.C. charter advocacy group, wrote an opinion piece about the AppleTree dispute in the 74, a nonprofit education news site that has received funding from organizations that advocate for charter schools.
“Given the city’s attitude, one might think its public charter schools had done something wrong,” Edelin wrote. “In fact, charters largely rescued public education in the District from near-collapse a quarter-century ago, when the federal government took control of a system in which both academics and safety had crumbled and half the students dropped out before graduating.”
But Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn said the dispute should not be magnified beyond what it is: a situation in which a school’s lease ran out and its leaders failed to secure a new location.
Kihn said he met with AppleTree leaders in October and was surprised they had not done more to find a new site.
He said it is “unfortunate” when a high-quality school does not have a home but said the city made all the contacts it could to help AppleTree find a public or private facility to lease.
Kihn said that for the past five years, the city charged AppleTree below-market rent, which he said should have allowed the school to set aside money to get a space of its own.
“This is a situation in which the charter school operator, due to their own irresponsibility, found themselves without a home as opposed to an example of the District government being unfriendly to charters,” Kihn said. “For them to suggest that this is an example of unfair action on the part of the city is really playing with the truth.”
Jack McCarthy, AppleTree’s chief executive, said his team has worked tirelessly in recent years to find space. AppleTree nearly secured a lease in the new upscale Southwest Waterfront development known as the Wharf, but that fell through, he said.
AppleTree has reserved space in a forthcoming phase of the Wharf, McCarthy said, but that will not be ready until 2022.
AppleTree, which operates about 10 schools in the District, is one of the few charter networks in the District that educate only preschoolers. The school in Southwest educates students who mostly come from black and low-income families, and McCarthy said the inability to open in the fall is a huge loss for the community.
The Southwest campus was unable to enroll students for the upcoming academic year because it did not secure a location.
“There has been a wave of anti-charter political activity over the past year,” McCarthy said. “So it was clear to some opinion leaders that the only reason it is being closed is because it is a charter.”
D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) echoed Kihn’s concerns at a council hearing last month, saying he was disappointed at the “hyperbolic language” that charter leaders have used to describe the dispute.
Jeanne Allen, of the national charter advocacy group, said that in a city where there is great demand for high-quality preschool seats, she is surprised officials are not doing everything they can to keep the school open.
“You would think they want to replicate and grow this in the city by tenfold,” she said.
Ivan Frishberg, the father of a rising seventh-grader at Jefferson, said the dispute is not about charter schools vs. neighborhood schools.
He said the middle school has accommodated the preschool for years and now the focus should fall on the Jefferson modernization promised for years.
“The elevated concern that there would be construction delays is very significant,” Frishberg said. “To be able to manage these things, you need to have a plan and to keep to a plan.”