State education leaders spent Wednesday in a tense, all-day showdown over whether a new Oklahoma City charter school will be allowed to keep its doors open. The Statewide Charter School Board heard hours of testimony on finances, attendance and academics at Proud to Partner Leadership Academy, with the school still set to present witnesses before a final vote. That decision will determine whether the academy’s brief run, which began in August 2024, comes to an early end.
State presenters, according to KOCO, raised alarms that students were shuffled between temporary sites during the first semester before the academy settled into a strip-mall campus on Highline Boulevard, and that attendance and test scores were troubling. Financial auditors testified the school began the 2024–25 year with roughly a 229,000 dollar negative balance, a number regulators said cast doubt on the school’s ability to meet payroll and basic operations. Board members spent much of the day grilling witnesses on whether students were receiving anything close to consistent instruction.
As the school’s sponsor, the Statewide Charter School Board put Proud to Partner on probation last November after multiple site visits and an audit turned up operational and financial problems. In its statement, the SCSB said staff had observed “a profound lack of student instruction, supervision and engagement” and reported that the school was running with a skeleton crew for about 115 high school students, prompting the board to demand an immediate corrective plan. Agency records also say SCSB staff were sometimes denied entry during follow-up visits, which only stiffened regulators’ resolve…