GILROY—Calling it a “Notice of Violations of Laws,” Gilroy school officials have outlined a litany of problems uncovered at the city’s only charter school and say it now faces closure if the issues are not resolved.
However, officials at Gilroy Prep School and its parent nonprofit, Navigator Schools, say that aside from an “inadvertent error” which has been corrected, they have done nothing wrong and expect to be fully exonerated when the Gilroy Unified School District investigation into alleged wrongdoing and mismanagement is completed.
In a more than 450-page response to the district’s June 30 notice listing violations of law and of the school’s charter petition, Navigator Executive Director James Dent wrote he expects the investigation “. . . will demonstrate the lack of foundation for all alleged violations and/or complaints, and that the GUSD will prepare a letter to the Charter School to this effect . . . .”
Following more than a year of off-again, on-again criticism of Dent and his management style by former Navigator board members, and an admission by Dent that he had hired his wife without board approval and made some bad management decisions, the Gilroy district commissioned an independent audit of the school’s books.
Gilroy Unified granted the charter’s petition four years ago as a public charter school and has the right to monitor its operations and revoke the charter if mismanagement is found and or if students are not served.
It was set to do just that about five years ago when administrators of Gilroy’s first charter school, El Portal Leadership School, relinquished their charter following years of criticism that students, mostly low-income Hispanics, were being hurt more than helped. The school had been run by the Mexican American Community Services Agency, known as MACSA, and shortly after it closed two of MACSA’s executives were convicted of stealing from employee retirement funds.
In the case of GPS and Navigator, the most damning among GUSD’s seven findings was that Navigator used funds earmarked for students and classrooms to pay for its sustained efforts over two years to open a charter school in Morgan Hill. That effort and another to expand to Salinas failed.
The funds, called Average Daily Attendance, are the per-pupil amounts given to the school by the state to educate students at GPS.
The audit found that, “GPS paid over $60,000 (in five months) to a staff person with the title ‘Director of Expansion and Outreach,’ whose primary responsibility was for expansion efforts having nothing to do with GPS’ operations or services to GPS students.” The report noted the person was not even listed on the GPS payroll.
In his written response, Dent called the allegation an “important error” in the audit report and an “inaccurate” finding.
He goes on to identify the staff person as Sharon Waller, one of the founders of Gilroy Prep School, and says that the money she was paid came in part from GPS and in part from the group’s other charter, Hollister Prep School.
At a public hearing before the Gilroy Unified School Board on Aug. 7, Dent and a lawyer representing Navigator, Janelle Ruley, responded to the board’s audit finding.
They said that it has already been acknowledged by Navigator that money used in expansion efforts was “improperly deducted” from GPS funds in what amounted to an “inadvertent error,” but that the fund had been made whole again and all ADA money now stays in the classroom.
At the hearing, 15 speakers, mostly teachers or parents of GPS students, spoke in Dent’s defense and reminded school trustees that the school, which has a high percentage of students from low-income families, has had extraordinary academic success and has been studied by educators from across the country and around the world.
But one speaker, Sonya Woolsey, who is among the school’s critics, reminded the school board that half of GPS’s teachers had left in June, requiring new teachers at least in grades K, 2, 3 and 5.
“That is devastating to me,” Woolsey said, and it was “glossed over” by all of the other speakers.
Dent in the past has said that he and other educators were so busy with academics they didn’t pay enough attention to the administrative side of things, and that’s when issues began to arise.
Woolsey’s response: “It’s so scary as a parent; it’s not OK to say ‘I didn’t now opening a school was like running a district.’”
Dent’s chief critic, former Navigator board member and GPS parent James Gargiulo, isn’t buying any of the explanations or excuses.
“I stand by my position that James Dent must be removed . . . and that the Navigator Board must be replaced,” he wrote Aug. 11 in response to a Dispatch question.
“I don’t agree this was an inadvertent error . . . There are simply too many problems to believe these are isolated incidents, and at this point, James Dent and the Navigator board have lost all credibility.”
In his note to the Dispatch, Gargiulo urged that GUSD take over management of GPS, “with the intent to keep GPS open and to integrate (it) into the GUSD network of elementary schools.”
