Members of a state board overseeing charter schools said they’re running out of patience with a local high school facing allegations of alarmingly low staff levels, weak finances and poor organization.
A corrective action plan from Proud To Partner Leadership Academy, an Oklahoma City charter high school known as PTPLA, “raised more questions than answers,” Statewide Charter School Board member Damon Gardenhire said.
Starting the process to close the school is “the mood I’m in,” Gardenhire said after hearing a presentation from PTPLA’s superintendent on Monday. Ultimately, he and the rest of the board voted to give school officials until January to provide more documents and allow site visits.
That extra month is “a lifeline” for PTPLA, the statewide board’s chairperson, Brian Shellem, said. The school will remain on probation in the meantime.
As the charter authorizer for PTPLA, the statewide board has the authority to cancel the school’s founding contract, which would effectively shut down the school and cut off its state funding.
The board placed PTPLA on probation, one step away from closure, on Nov. 10 and demanded a corrective action plan. It did so after board staff reported observing only one teacher working at the school and a lack of rigorous instruction for PTPLA’s 100 students. School officials have said those reports were inaccurate.
Board staff also raised financial concerns after the school laid off teachers in October and finished the previous fiscal year with a budget deficit.
PTPLA Superintendent Dawn Bowles said she maintained a full teaching staff despite the layoffs because the affected teachers agreed to work as unpaid volunteers and for part-time pay. They could return to full-time status once the school receives additional state funding in January, she said.
Multiple statewide board members said they were still unsatisfied with Bowles’ response after listening to her present for nearly 2 1/2 hours on Monday. After her presentation, she told news reporters that her school has “no unresolved deficiencies.”
PTPLA leaders haven’t turned over even basic documents like the school’s current budget, Shellem and statewide board staff said.
Email records, which Oklahoma Voice obtained, show PTPLA received repeated requests for all of its budgets since July 2024, the daily schedules and duties of its staff, and employee and volunteer sign-in sheets from July 1 to present.
“We’re hunting for information, and it shouldn’t be that hard,” Shellem said.
The school so far has turned over mid-to-late November timesheets for its part-time workers, its enrollment counts, details on its reduction in force and a letter state officials requested that confirmed PTPLA received a $400,000 grant this summer, according to records Oklahoma Voice received from the state board.
Bowles said she and other school leaders are willing to cooperate with the statewide board. She said “all that has been requested, we have provided.”
“We’ll be always willing to work together, as we say, in the spirit of cooperation and partnership with transparency,” she said. “We have nothing to hide.”
Email records show PTPLA’s school board chairperson, Sharri Coleman, wrote to state officials Nov. 30 to inform them the school would not provide any documents before Monday’s meeting beyond what it submitted with its corrective action plan.
“Our priority for the remainder of the semester is serving our Ambassadors,” Coleman wrote using the school’s term for its students, “so the Superintendent and PTPLA staff will devote their time to instruction and end-of-semester responsibilities rather than gathering new materials ahead of the Board’s review.”
On Friday, the school’s attorney sent a letter threatening legal action.
The statewide board breached PTPLA’s charter contract by not giving sufficient notice, failing to properly evaluate the school and relying on “unverified assumptions” before placing the school on probation, according to the letter, which Oklahoma Voice obtained.
Shellem said the accusations in the letter are “baseless.”
Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence.
