A court order may be the only way to keep Pinnacle Charter School open after attempts failed to work out an arrangement on an order from Albany to close the school.Albany told Pinnacle late Friday the school will be closed immediately and yanked its charter.
Pinnacle was ordered closed by the Board of Regents in April of last year over bad test scores but that was blocked in court, although it's on appeal. The school is planning to be in State Supreme Court Wednesday to seek another order keeping the school open.
The order last Friday left parents with very few options on where to send their children. One parent named Rosemary says she wants her son kept in Pinnacle rather than switch to a regular public school.
"Look what they're going through right now in public schools. All these kids asking for transfers out of public schools, why would you send charter school kids to the public schools, when they are trying to get out of there?," she said.
On Monday, 98 transfer applications were filed with the city so children could go from Pinnacle to a public school in good standing. The district already has 2,200 transfer applications and only 300-500 openings in schools in good standing. That is likely to be discussed in the planned court hearing tomorrow.
Pinnacle's Board of Trustees met late yesterday and then went into an executive session to talk about the court action. Trustees also heard from Chief Academic Officer Linda Marszalek who told them the school had turned around, demonstrated by the latest state test scores of the 20 schools in their socioeconomic category.
"Out of the 20 schools, we are now the second school in comparison to our proficiency scores with the similar schools that are like us demographically. In ELA and in math, we are currently the third school out of the 20. So, you can see we have made a considerable amount of growth compared to relative schools that are very similar to us," Marszalek said.
State Education Department officials were in Pinnacle yesterday to talk about closing but not about ways to keep the school open for its 550 students. The officials left through a back door to avoid reporters.
