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Say Goodbye To Deion Sanders' Charter School

This article is more than 9 years old.

"Neon" Deion "Prime Time" Sanders has been many things: pro football player, pro baseball player, TV commentator, reality-show star, Lifetime Network movie actor, live-tweeter of his own domestic troubles. But it appears he'll have to cross one thing off of his list -- charter-school operator. From the Dallas Morning News:

Saying it has no chance of persuading the state to allow the school to continue to operate, Prime Prep’s nonprofit board plans to meet Monday night [Jan. 27] to vote to surrender its charter.

The meeting was scheduled ahead of Tuesday morning’s [Jan. 28] final charter revocation hearing for the school, which was co-founded by Pro Football Hall of Famer Deion Sanders.

Although it is facing crushing debt, the school is likely to continue operating for the short term. State officials have said they hope to keep the school open — if it’s financially possible — through the end of the semester, even if its charter is revoked.

Sanders was among those in 2012 who opened the school with the goal of combining a college prepartory curriculum with a high-powered athletic program. The school, with two locations in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, did develop a big-time basketball program, but most of what it produced was chaos and headlines. Through the course of its two-plus years, Sanders was fired, hired, re-fired and re-hired as school leaders and administrators fought with local media, with the authority that runs Texas public high school sports, and with each other (sometimes physically).

As the chaos mounted, so did the bills, which got harder to pay as enrollment fell by half to about 300 students, and eventually the state of Texas stepped in to oversee things. Sanders claimed a merger with another charter school was imminent (it wasn't). He also seemed just as concerned with his latest reality show, refusing to grant an interview to a local TV station regarding the school when it refused to allow the show's cameras to film the interview that was being filmed.

The Jan. 28 meeting was to feature Prime Prep's appeal of its charter revocation, but (from the Dallas Morning News)...

T. Christopher Lewis, board president of Uplift Fort Worth, which holds the Prime Prep charter, said the school’s finances were in “utter chaos.”

“We don’t have the financial resources to defend ourselves in an appeal,” he said. “In order to not waste the time of everyone involved, it was in Uplift’s best interest to give up the charter.”

The law firm preparing the school’s appeal quit this week after Prime Prep failed to pay its bills and stopped communicating with the attorneys, according to legal filings.

Prime Prep is an extreme case, but it's a cautionary one for any parent in love with the idea of a charter school. While initially pitched as an model that could promote innovative teaching (with none of those pesky union teachers to get in the way) at a lower cost for motivated parents and students, it appears, at least based on an influential Stanford study, that the schools, which are run by private operators though they technically are public schools, are a very mixed bag. In some cases their students are outperforming public school peers on standardized tests, but in many cases they aren't, and in many cases they're worse -- and costing taxpayers a lot of money in the process, with less accountability than public schools.

Which is to say, the lesson of Prime Prep is that parents can't get caught up in the term "charter," and definitely can't get caught up in celebrity, in picking a school.