Aspire Public Schools Announces Court Decision in Statewide Benefit Charter Litigation

Oak­land, CA — Aspire Pub­lic Schools announced today that it has received a final deci­sion from the Supe­rior Court of Alameda County in Cal­i­for­nia School Boards Asso­ci­a­tion, et al., v. Cal­i­for­nia State Board of Edu­ca­tion (Case No. RG07353566), involv­ing the State Board of Education’s (SBE) approval of the Aspire statewide ben­e­fit char­ter. Aspire Pub­lic Schools is named as a Real Party in Inter­est in this court case. Aspire Pub­lic Schools is the highest-performing large pub­lic school sys­tem serv­ing pre­dom­i­nantly low-income stu­dents in Cal­i­for­nia, and the largest char­ter man­age­ment orga­ni­za­tion in the state.

In the 29-page deci­sion*, Supe­rior Court Judge Jo-Lynne Q. Lee, ordered that the State Board of Edu­ca­tion (1) set aside its 2007 approval and the May 2011 amend­ment approval of a statewide char­ter for Aspire and (2) adopt reg­u­la­tions in com­pli­ance with Edu­ca­tion Code Sec­tion 47605.8(a), both within 350 days from the date that a copy of the writ was served on the State Board of Edu­ca­tion. A return of the writ must be sub­mit­ted on or before June 24, 2013. Aspire believes that this deci­sion may require it to seek local char­ters for the 2013/14 school year.

Judge Lee also specif­i­cally stated: “The court has set a one-year dead­line for the return on the writ of man­date in order to reduce any hard­ship to presently enrolled stu­dents and facil­i­tate the tran­si­tion of schools cur­rently oper­at­ing under Aspire’s statewide char­ter…” As such, the Aspire schools cur­rently oper­at­ing under the statewide ben­e­fit char­ter will con­tinue to do so for the 2012/13 school year.

“We are study­ing the court’s order and have begun today the process of seek­ing local char­ters for these six schools while we con­sider other options,” said James Will­cox, Aspire’s Chief Exec­u­tive. “We are com­mit­ted to serv­ing all of our stu­dents and fam­i­lies who count on Aspire and want to calm any uncer­tainty that this deci­sion may cause. As we dis­cussed on our recent con­fer­ence call, we have applied for char­ters or renewals nearly 60 times since our found­ing with pos­i­tive results in all cases. We are hope­ful that the three school dis­tricts involved will rec­og­nize the suc­cess we have had for stu­dents from their com­mu­ni­ties. Aspire will also be review­ing the mat­ter with the State Attor­ney General’s office and may par­tic­i­pate in an appeal of the decision.”

The six Aspire statewide ben­e­fit schools include:

• Aspire Alexan­der Twi­light Col­lege Prepara­tory Acad­emy, Sacra­mento, CA
• Aspire Alexan­der Twi­light Sec­ondary Acad­emy, Sacra­mento, CA
• Aspire APEX Acad­emy, Stock­ton, CA
• Aspire Junior Col­le­giate Acad­emy, Hunt­ing­ton Park, CA
• Aspire Port City Acad­emy, Stock­ton, CA
• Aspire Titan Acad­emy, Hunt­ing­ton Park, CA

The stu­dents at these schools rep­re­sent 16 per­cent of Aspire’s cur­rent enroll­ment of approx­i­mately 12,000 stu­dents. Five of these schools were recip­i­ents of pro­ceeds from Aspire’s Series 2010 Cal­i­for­nia Statewide Com­mu­ni­ties Devel­op­ment Author­ity School Facil­ity Rev­enue Bonds. Aspire Junior Col­le­giate and Titan Acad­e­mies were recently rec­og­nized as Dis­tin­guished Schools by the Cal­i­forn­ian Depart­ment of Education.

* The court’s deci­sion will be posted to the court’s web­site. Click on Case Sum­mary and then enter the case num­ber RG07353566. Then click on Reg­is­ter of Actions and scroll down to the State­ment of Deci­sion dated June 22, 2012.