Summit Academy closes permanently

By Harold Gwin

The school’s former students might get to remain in other Summit schools in the region.

YOUNGSTOWN — The Summit Academy Community School for Alternative Learners, 144 N. Schenley Ave., has closed its doors permanently with the end of this school year.

May 29 was the last day of classes for the elementary school that served 150 students. The building at one time was the St. Brendan School which closed in 2005. It was being leased by Summit Academy.

The school, one of five charter schools operated in Youngstown and Warren by Summit Academy Management of Akron, didn’t shut down of its own volition.

“This is a forced closure,” said Gerald Horak, CEO of Summit Academy Management.

Summit is working with the parents of the school’s students to try to develop a plan for their children’s education wherever they may go, he said.

The Ohio Department of Education announced last August that the charter school would have to close at the end of this school year because of poor academic performance in each of the previous three years and had shown no improvement in the last two. It has been rated in academic emergency on its annual state local report card.

Even if its academic performance improved this year, it is too late, said Scott Blake, ODE spokesman.

“It’s going to close,” Blake said last week, explaining that the closure was announced early to give parents time to work out plans for their children’s continuing education.

Horak said enrollment didn’t drop after the announcement.

“We’ve got a very supportive group of parents,” he explained.

The students are mostly learning-disabled children, and you can’t measure their performance with the same type of test used for a gifted child, Horak said.

The school was ungraded and assigned children by age level rather than grade level.

“They learn differently. They test differently, but they still learn,” he said.

Summit can demonstrate that the students there show more than a year’s growth in a year’s time in the school, he said.

Blake said special-needs charter schools are judged under the same guidelines as traditional public schools offering special-needs classes.

Summit is doing what it can to help those parents who want to have their children remain in a Summit facility, Horak said.

Some may be able to attend a Summit school in Warren this fall, and there is also a possibility that the mission of Summit’s middle school on Oak Street in Youngstown may be expanded to include children at the elementary level.

That’s an issue now being discussed with Summit’s school sponsor, the Lucas County Educational Service Center, Horak said.

Middle-school programming could be expanded without prior ODE approval if the Lucas County ESC agrees to the change, he said.

Meanwhile, Summit Academy Management has been trying to educate the state Legislature on the impact of automatic closure on special-needs children.

House Bill 1, a proposed biennial budget scenario now under consideration in Columbus, would provide a different tool for measuring academic performance in special-needs schools, Horak said.

Summit operated more than two dozen charter schools in Ohio this year.

gwin@vindy.com