Audio clip
Rick Smith
Less than three months after Ivy Academy opened its doors, Hamilton County Schools officials say they have concerns about the charter high school.
Rick Smith, Hamilton County Schools’ deputy superintendent, said that since last week he has received calls from three parents asking that their children be transferred from Ivy Academy to another school.
Mr. Smith said the parents told him their children did not receive the opportunities and the unique instruction they were promised at the beginning of the year.
He said he denied the transfers because, like magnet school students, those attending a charter school must stay enrolled for the entire year once accepted.
The parents also told him that Ivy’s director of programs and operations, Steve Bontekoe, was leaving the school, Mr. Smith said.
Ivy Academy board president Chris Daly said Monday that Mr. Bontekoe resigned, but Mr. Bontekoe said he was laid off.
“They laid off the director of programs. I did not resign,” Mr. Bontekoe said. “I feel like Ivy is a beautiful idea, and I wish them the best of luck.”
Mr. Daly also said he was unaware of that any parents had requested transfers for their students.
“We’ve not had three students call us, asking to withdraw,” he said.
The school also had some transportation issues that were recently resolved and it lost its secretary, whom Mr. Daly said was “let go.” He said he would not comment further on personnel issues.
Mr. Smith said all the school’s operational issues were troubling, especially the loss of Mr. Bontekoe, the person chosen to manage the school.
“I have concerns when I see the kinds of things I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks,” he said. “You shouldn’t be dealing with those kinds of things a quarter of the way through the school year.”
Ivy Academy began the process of approval in November 2007. After its original applications were denied several times by the Hamilton County Board of Education, the school twice appealed to the state board of education and eventually won approval from the state in August 2008.
School leaders then went through three different locations, finally deciding on 40 acres next to the North Chickamauga Creek Pocket Wilderness in Soddy-Daisy.
Hamilton County officials extended several deadlines so Ivy administrators could get their certificate of occupancy in time to start classes in August.
Despite any bumps in the road, Mr. Daly said, his school is in good shape now. While they’d always love to have more money, officials are not looking at the possibility of layoffs, he said.
“I think we are sustainable and moving forward,” he said. “Any time you’re a new organization, there are challenges that happen, and you face them. We’ve had great success.”
Hamilton County also has a second charter school, Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy, an all-girls middle-high school that opened in the summer.
Kelli Gauthier covers K-12 education in Hamilton County for the Times Free Press. She started at the paper as an intern in 2006, crisscrossing the region writing feature stories from Pikeville, Tenn., to Lafayette, Ga. She also covered crime and courts before taking over the education beat in 2007. A native of Frederick, Md., Kelli came south to attend Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism. Before newspapers, ...
It is exhausting to hear Ivy Academy repeatedly nitpicked by people who have not spent any quality time at the school with the students and teachers.
Ivy Academy is the first environmental outdoor charter high school in Chattanooga AND Tennessee AND the Southeast. This city should be proud of the efforts of the founders, administrators, board of directors, teachers, parents and students behind Ivy Academy. They have all been willing to "take the path less traveled by" through their support of a vision for a new kind of education and school environment in our community.
Despite this reporter's continuous negative reports documenting the schools bumps in the roads along the way, the school opened its doors this year to a diverse group of 9th graders from all over Hamilton County who were looking for something different - and that is what they got. These students spend more time outdoors in a day than most children today do in a month. Most are excited about learning and school (and these are teenagers, let me remind you, which makes this even more remarkable). And the diversity of students within the school is what we all dream of our community becoming.
There is so much to Ivy Academy that is new and wonderful and exciting - articles like this one just miss the mark entirely.
I encourage readers to make up their own minds about this charter school (www.ivyacademychattanooga.com). It is an extraordinary idea whose time has come - to Chattanooga, of all places!
Please - let's encourage visionaries and new ideas in our town.
It's interesting that Mr. Smith would criticize another school in approximately the same week 12 of his own Hamilton County Schools received straight F's on their report card while five other schools earned no better than a D. And yet, three unhappy parents at Ivy Academy are cause for him to be concerned? It would seem to me that he and the rest of the elected school officials have other things to focus their attention on. Or maybe that's been the problem all along.
The force driving negative reporting about the Ivy School is HDCE's fear of competitor success. If we let something so simple as individualized, focused education delivered to children who do not fear for their well-being/lives when coming to class be denigrated by an inept superintendent and staff who are just marking time until they can retire (on your tax dollars), then we will always have what we now have. Ivy School is leading a way toward better education for our children, as is the Girl's Leadership Academy. Both of these charter schools were designed to salvage the very children that HCDE has failed. Such schools appeal to parents and children who cannot cope successfully with the disorganization, political infighting, mudslinging, low morale and inadequate resources offered by the HCDE. HCDE is afraid that Ivy School will succeed. That is THE reason that the HCDE criticizes it and draws the press into the fray to do it's dirty work - writing only the negative about the Ivy School. We should be proud that something so innovative and courageous as this school is blooming in our area and that OUR children have access to it.
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