TEMECULA - The board of directors of The New School, an embattled charter school that operated in downtown Fallbrook for three years but failed to locate a permanent site, voted Friday morning to disband the institution and surrender its charter.
A week before classes were set to begin, Good Schools for All Leadership Academy chose to close its doors.
The K-5 charter school, which operated out of the second floor of Mount Olive Baptist Church in Delray Beach for the past three years, was supposed to open last month at its new location at the Wayne Barton Study Center in Boca Raton.
Gerard Consuegra, educational program director for Ed Futures, -- the San Diego-based company that managed the school -- said the decision to close came down to low enrollment and poor timing…
Student enrollment numbers over the past three years ranged from the mid-40s to the low 70s. Consuegra said he hoped to open in the 70 range at Wayne Barton, but a day before Ed Futures decided to close the school, only 46 students were enrolled…
"It was the whole uncertainty of the situation," he said…
"It was for parents looking for a different school environment, where their children could get more individual attention," Consuegra said. Some classes had as few as 10 students…
Two Palm Beach County elementary charter schools will remain empty today when classes resume across the district, officials said Tuesday.
Montessori Academy of Northern Palm Beach in Palm Beach Gardens and Good Schools for All Leadership Academy, located last year in Delray Beach, have both closed, according to administrators at the two schools.
Montessori Academy's location in the former media center for H.L. Watkins Middle, 9482 MacArthur Blvd., was too small for the number of students school administrators hoped to serve, said Joseph Orr, the school's founder and former chief academic officer for the school district…
An audit earlier this year found that the charter school, which opened in 2005, was in a state of "financial emergency," a term defined by the state to mean failure to pay creditors and loans for 90 days or more.
An investigation of the charter school last year by The Palm Beach Post found many examples of financial and procedural mismanagement. The school was forced to send back $114,000 of a $300,000 federal start-up grant after failing to submit proper financial reports and, at that time, had no teachers or administrators trained to be Montessori educators and no functioning board of governors…
