When Minnesota charter schools fail, vulnerable students pay the price

The students of Upper Mississippi Academy pulled each other into lingering hugs, wiped tears into their sweatshirts and leaned over yearbooks to scrawl farewell messages in colorful ink. One student half-heartedly sang “The Final Countdown,” trying to lighten the mood on the last day.

The start of summer meant the end of this St. Paul charter school, which couldn’t afford to keep its doors open past May.

The staff and students, drawn to the school for its mission of inclusive, personalized learning, would need to find somewhere else to teach and learn in the fall.

About half of the roughly 150 middle and high schoolers were students of color; about a third of them qualified for special education services. At Upper Mississippi Academy (UMA), sandwiched into a downtown building between two theaters, they said they found a place where they could be themselves no matter their sexual orientation, mental health struggles or home life.

“Usually people who go to charter schools are looking for that small community,” said Alyona Vietrova, whose sophomore year ended with the school’s closure. “But it’s a community that is fragile. You can lose it at any time because the school can close.”

On average, about 380 Minnesota students are caught up each year in the often sudden shuttering of charter schools. Traditional public schools rarely collapse like that — when districts close or consolidate buildings, it’s usually after months or years of public discussion. But in the state that birthed the charter school movement to revolutionize public education more than three decades ago, the death of a charter school is nearly an annual event.

The disruptive churn of those closures is further evidence that the country’s oldest charter school system is too frail to uphold the movement’s initial promises of innovative education to raise achievement for all. Charter schools have succeeded in other states. But the ones in Minnesota have largely failed to outperform public schools in academics. And they’ve struggled just to stay solvent. Most of the 100 charter schools that have shut down did so after financial blunders.

The neighborhoods hit the hardest by charter failures are typically the ones where students are most in need of quality school options. North Minneapolis families desperate for educational alternatives have seen at least 17 charter schools close in the area over the past 25 years. But the pain isn’t limited to the urban core. Anoka, Brown, Cass, Stearns, St. Louis and Waseca counties have all had at least one failed charter.

Charter school leaders say the closings create a cycle that pushes more schools and students toward failure. The constant shifting of students from one school to another means enrollment numbers are often too uncertain for administrators to create accurate budgets. Some leaders said they accept more students than they can accommodate to offset expected losses when September rolls around.

“I’ve seen lots of kids charter-school hopping. By fifth grade, I saw kids who were in their third or fourth school,” said Olutimilehin Olusanya, who has taught at a handful of charter schools in the Twin Cities, including Legacy of Dr. Josie R. Johnson Montessori in north Minneapolis, which closed abruptly in January. “It’s really hard for kids to jump around like that and miss foundational skills.”

Studies have shown that changing schools can increase students’ chances of dropping out and that students who change schools multiple times often fall behind their peers academically.

Minnesota has some of the worst racial education disparities in the nation, and families of color have increasingly turned to charters as an alternative to traditional public schools. Minnesota’s charter students are twice as likely as those in traditional public schools to be people of color and three times more likely to qualify for extra English language learning support.

Khulia Pringle, the Minnesota manager of organizing and outreach at the parent-led advocacy organization National Parents Union, helps Minnesota families navigate the search for a school community they love. Many of those parents, she said, don’t care whether a school is a traditional public school or a public charter. They just want to know if it will work for their child. Parents search for schools that are culturally affirming and ones that offer convenient transportation and afterschool options.

“I do try to make them aware that [a charter school] could close at any point,” Pringle said, adding that even she didn’t fully understand that until her own daughter’s charter school closed in the early 2000s.

“For a parent, watching a school close is heartbreaking,” she said. “Whatever stability your kids had is no longer.”

Upper Mississippi Academy began as a two-grade school inside the barracks at Fort Snelling in 2013. It moved several times before landing in the old McNally Smith College of Music building in downtown St. Paul in 2019. That’s when the school, which then had 311 students, began to unravel.

The move seemed wise at the time. Enrollment was growing and administrators believed the new site would let them add another 150 students. But as school officials now realize, those projections were faulty. The site was too small to accommodate that many students.

The lease also included rent increases that proved financially unfeasible. But instead of slowing spending when enrollment declined, the school’s former top administrator kept spending, even when the board told the leader to freeze employment and contracting practices in 2022, records show.

Enrollment continued to slide, and so did test scores. Fewer than half of the students scored proficient on state reading, math and science tests in the 2023-24 school year.

The school ran out of money this year. Administrators slashed payroll and scrimped and saved in other ways to keep classes going through May. Teachers taught multiple subjects and volunteered to clean their own classrooms to save hundreds of dollars a month on janitorial services.

“We made it to the end of the year, and that is a good thing,” said Katie Camacho, the school’s board chair and a science teacher.

Marit Gennrich attended UMA for just three months of her junior year before it closed. It was a critical healing experience after struggling with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues that made it difficult for her to attend her old school.

“My excitement for learning was petering out,” she said. “It got to the point where I didn’t even want to go into the building.”

But at UMA, Gennrich, who is autistic, felt comfortable and confident in class and loved the freedom to take on projects that interested her. She was eager to be at school, often showing up a full hour before her first class. Before long, she was joining new friends for lunchtime excursions through downtown St. Paul.

Then school leaders announced UMA would not stay open.

Gennrich’s mom, Laura Gennrich, said she was “devastated” by the news and overwhelmed by the thought of finding a new school.

She had been hoping to send her younger daughter, who is also autistic, to UMA in the fall as well.

“I didn’t want to believe a school could just close, especially one where it seemed like the kids were really happy,” Laura Gennrich said.

Andreas Jurewitsch, the school’s social studies and woodworking teacher, said students who struggled elsewhere found acceptance at UMA. Whether they had special needs, were gay, lesbian, or trans, were homeless, or wore eccentric outfits each day, they found their own little “herd” of friends, he said.

“The kids who go here really need a school like this,” he said.

He joined the school board to try to save the school once he realized it was in financial trouble. He’d worked for years at General John Vessey Junior Leadership Academy in St. Paul, which closed abruptly mid-school year in 2011 because of financial woes.

“The issue is that charter schools in Minnesota are supposed to be kind of their own district,” Jurewitsch said. “There’s a lack of oversight and expertise at the school level.”

The final staff meeting included tears and anger. A few teachers worried aloud whether they, like their students, could find another school with the same feel as UMA.

“There’s an institutional failure here,” said Jordan Tyler, a language arts teacher. “It’s really important for the rest of us going out there to know that this is going to keep happening to charter schools. There are charter schools who are doing really beautiful things ... who might be in the same spot we are in five years.”

Camacho taught at three charter schools in six years, including another one that closed in 2020. She and several other UMA staff members spent this summer considering jobs outside of charters, looking for employers that could promise more stability.

“I’m thankful that we no longer have to put in the long hours of trying to figure out how to save the school,” Camacho said. “But walking away from a place that I expected to work until I retire is really, really hard.”

On the last day of school at Upper Mississippi Academy, junior Tavarius Hill quietly thanked and hugged Camacho.

“I will cry about this later,” he said into her shoulder, “when it hits that it is over.”

After a childhood shaped by repeated bouts of homelessness, UMA was Hill’s constant for the past five years. It was where he improved his reading skills, where he felt his social anxiety start to fade and where he began growing into someone who had pride in himself. This past year, the school’s social worker helped Hill find a safe house to live in on his own.

Most of UMA’s students chose other charters, splitting up across several schools in and around St. Paul. Others considered online school to avoid the anxiety of being the new kid in class.

Hill, who now attends High School for Recording Arts in St. Paul, lingered at UMA long after most of his classmates left. He spoke with a few more teachers, thanking them for their care and help.

“I feel like this place made me a better person,” Hill said to the school’s counselor.

Then, as the school administrators huddled to discuss the arrival of a dumpster and the tedious process of selling classroom furniture, Hill stepped toward the exit, zipped up his hoodie and pushed open the door. He wrapped his arms around himself and walked into the rain alone, leaving behind a school that — in his words — felt like “home.”

Click here to read more of this investigation and watch a video about charter schools.