Southside Academy switches management companies

By Denise Dick

denise_dick@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Beginning next school year, Southside Academy will be under the management of another company and in a different building.

The board of directors of the academy voted earlier this year not to renew the contract of White Hat Management Inc., said William Mullane, board president. The board hired The Educational Empowerment Group, Akron, as the school’s management company.

The school will leave the old South High School building on Market Street and move into St. Patrick Church. It will retain the Southside Academy name.

Besides the location change, parents and students will see other differences under the new management.

Mullane said the board was looking for more collaboration between the school and parents and families and more transparency in operations.

“Charters were supposed to be an opportunity for experimentation and to find solutions for the problems facing schools and to share those solutions — not to keep it close to the vest and treat it as proprietary,” Mullane said.

Instead, he said, it’s turned education into a competition, and the laws governing charter schools allow profit to play too much of a role.

The board of directors wants the school to be engaged in the community, working with the Boys & Girls Club, extension services, Students Motivated by the Arts and neighborhood groups, he said.

Mullane, supervisor of school improvement at Ashtabula County Educational Service Center, was longtime principal at Warren G. Harding High School in Warren.

White Hat Management of Akron has managed the school since it changed from Eagle Heights Academy to Southside Academy in 2010. The state closed Eagle Heights because of poor academic performance.

The former South Side High School building also is too big for the number of students in the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school. About 235 students attend.

White Hat owns the building. White Hat officials couldn’t be reached.

Even if the Southside Academy board had renewed the contract with White Hat, it’s unlikely the Ohio Council of Community Schools, the school’s sponsor, would have, Mullane said. He pointed to the school’s failure to meet academic-progress requirements.

White Hat is the largest for-profit charter-school operator in Ohio and the third-largest in the nation. It also operates Life Skills Centers in both Youngstown and Warren. Its owner, David Brennan, has been a contributor to political campaigns including those of Gov. John Kasich.

The company has been sued by the boards of directors of 10 of its schools in the Akron and Cleveland areas, contending that the boards have no authority in governing the schools. The company won’t give the board members financial or other information about operations, the suit argues.