Another voucher school closes, stirring a simmering pot of issues
Just nine days into the school year, a Milwaukee voucher school abruptly shut down, drawing renewed criticism from opponents of efforts to privatize Wisconsin’s K–12 public school system.
Daughters of the Father Christian Academy says it closed voluntarily, but the Department of Public Instruction had cited it for multiple problems and reportedly tried to remove it from the state’s Parental Choice Program over the summer. The school maintains a website that still features an enrollment tab. The academy’s enrollment is listed as 240 students. Now those students’ parents are scrambling for a place to enroll their kids.
The DPI did not return phone messages seeking information about the closure.
By most measures, the school appeared doomed from the start. It managed to achieve accreditation, beginning in the 2007–2008 school year, despite a number of red flags that Fox 6 news uncovered during an investigation in May. Those included the revelation that school founder Bishop Doris Pinkney had filed for bankruptcy three times since 1995 and did not have a teaching credential. The school’s application was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.
Fox 6 launched the probe after parents of students at the academy complained that the school abruptly ceased providing bus service to students in middle of the last academic year due to financial mismanagement. Pinkney acknowledged to a bankruptcy court that she was earning $132,000 annually.
In 2011, a childcare center that Pinkney ran was shuttered for “substantial and repeat violations of licensing rules,” according to the Wisconsin Department of Families and Children.
A study published in January by the Wisconsin State Journal concluded that voucher school closings are a common in the state. Eleven schools participating in the voucher program were removed within a year of opening due to poor educational standards — at a $4.1 million cost to taxpayers.
The WSJ article appeared just after Milwaukee’s Travis Technology High School was terminated for failing to meet state requirements during the winter break of the 2014–15 school year.
The shutdown of Daughters of the Father Christian Academy brought the number of terminated voucher schools in the state to 57 since 2003, according to a just-released report by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Those schools have cost Wisconsin taxpayers a total of $176 million.
News of the school’s closing came one week after Republican legislators appeared poised to fast-track an expansion of Gov. Scott Walker’s private school voucher program. In the 2015–17 biennial budget, Republicans lifted a cap on the number of voucher schools permitted to operate in the state by one percent annually. But on Sept. 4, Republicans introduced a new proposal — Senate Bill 250 — that would exempt certain school districts from abiding by that limitation, allowing voucher schools to expand more rapidly.
Special interests
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