Four Hillsborough County charter schools are immediately shuttering after voluntarily surrendering their contracts with the district, a move that school board members called stunning and an indicator of a dysfunctional state funding model.
As the schools gave their students and staff a 60-day notice, board members recently called for greater accountability for uneven standards, and said it was a sign that state funding was not enough, even for schools with fewer regulations.
Some of the schools closing faced enrollment challenges, while others faced financial ones.
Victory Charter School Tampa, which originally opened as Avant Garde Academy Westchase in 2017 and recently moved to Riverview, had only 59 students last year, down from 292 during the 2021-22 school year.
A separate school from the same operator for grades 6-12, which opened later and shared a campus, saw only 35 students, down from 155 the year before. It had a negative fund balance of more than $49,000.
Victory’s two schools both earned “A” grades last year. District officials said their management company didn’t take any fees for managing and took out loans, but still struggled to make ends meet.
Legacy Preparatory Academy, which opened as Mount Pleasant Standard Based Middle School in 2003, had a negative fund balance of $823 and enrollment of 55, compared to 136 during the 2022-23 school year. The school earned a “B” grade this year.
The Collaboratory Preparatory Academy, which opened in 2017, had increasing enrollment — 83 students compared to 81 the year before — and a positive fund balance, but the school’s founder, former state Rep. Trey Traviesa, said running the school had been a labor of philanthropic love for him and his family. At the time the school opened, he said, the only public schools in the surrounding East Tampa neighborhood were “D”- and “F”-rated schools. Now, he said, they are mostly “A” and “B” schools.
“The school district has done such a good job of improving schools in that area,” he said. “We saw a need, we met a need. It was an oasis for kids, where they were safe, loved and cared for. … Running a school is a very important thing. It takes a lot of human and economic investment.”
Still, board members said the four closures, which led to 292 students being displaced, are troubling.
Board member Henry “Shake” Washington asked what the district was doing to bring the displaced students back to public school, and district officials said they’d already met with students and staff to talk about opportunities within the district. So far, 131 had been placed in public schools.
Board member Nadia Combs said the district had never seen such a thing at this scale.
“Florida has spent years promoting educational choice and expanding charter schools, but choice is not meaningful if a school can become financially unstable and families learn too late that it cannot remain open,” she said. “Florida continues to rank at the bottom nationally with the per-student funding. This is no longer a traditional public school funding issue. We’re now seeing that inadequate funding, lack of oversight, enrollment competition, and insufficient state-level safeguards can also destabilize the very choice system the state continues to promote.”
Board chairperson Karen Perez said she was “stunned” and pointed out that some schools served 100% economically disadvantaged students and largely minority students.
“A lot of these schools do target the minority families because they struggle a lot,” she said. “A lot of parents will trust these schools with their students because they’re thinking, ‘OK, there’s a smaller classroom; they’re going to really support my students.’”
Angela Weary-Crooks, director of charter schools, said independent charters haven’t been immune from the financial challenges public schools face.
“With some of our smaller, independent charter schools, there used to be waiting lists of 300-plus students, and now they’re down to maybe 100 on their waiting list, so they’re definitely feeling the impact,” she said. “Whereas you have charter schools that are managed by larger corporate businesses, right? And so they pool their money together, and so it’s a different field.”
Board member Patti Rendon pointed out that charter schools face less regulation and financial restrictions — including a required fund balance, and retirement and insurance benefits for teachers — than traditional public schools.
“It’s frustrating when we feel like we’re losing funds to charter schools, and now charter schools can’t even sustain because there’s so many choices between private schools and homeschool options,” board member Jessica Vaughn said. “What’s happening when we have to close schools because we don’t have enough students, or when charter schools have to close because they don’t have enough funding? Who that hurts our most is our students and our families that have absolutely no stability.”
