Barack Obama Leadership Academy, one of Michigan’s oldest charter schools, is facing the end of its authorization by Detroit Public Schools Community District after board members signaled this week they have no interest in renewing the school’s contract beyond June 30.
The school has operated on Detroit’s east side since 1997, serving roughly 300 students in kindergarten through fifth grade with an African-centric curriculum. Originally founded as Timbuktu Academy, it has spent nearly three decades as a community institution. Now, four board members present at a Wednesday night committee meeting made clear the charter has not done enough to earn another year under DPSCD’s authorization.
The path to this point was not sudden. DPSCD administrators actually came to the committee with a measured proposal: approve a one-year transitional contract that would let the school either find a new authorizer or plan for closure. That recommendation was meant to soften the landing for students and families. Board members rejected even that, declining to put the charter’s contract renewal on the April board meeting agenda at all. Leaving an item off the agenda is effectively a burial. No vote, no contract, no path forward through the district.
Board member Bessie Harris put the academic case plainly. “The improvement is sad,” she said during the meeting. “From an F to a D, that’s not an improvement.”
Harris, Vice Chair Corletta Vaughn, Chair LaTrice McClendon, and Steve Bland Jr. were the four members present for the charter discussion. All three of the women said explicitly they were not interested in voting on a renewal. Monique Bryant left the meeting before this portion of the discussion. Iris Taylor and Ida Carol Simmons-Short were absent entirely.
That attendance split drew sharp criticism from the school’s leadership. Cha-Rhonda Edgerson, CEO of the charter, called the board’s decision “devastating” and argued that making it without a full board present denied the school a fair hearing. She described Obama Leadership Academy as a “pillar in that community” and raised the practical concern that families and students now have almost no time to make other arrangements before the school year ends and a new one begins.
Superintendent Nikolai Vitti tried to thread a middle ground at the meeting. He framed the one-year recommendation as a “transitionary year” designed to give the charter options, not a rubber stamp on another cycle of underperformance. “That’s up to the charter,” he said, referring to whether the school pursues another authorizer. Edgerson did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the school plans to do exactly that.
The mechanics of Michigan’s charter authorization system matter here. Districts like DPSCD, alongside community colleges and universities, can serve as authorizers for public school academies. In exchange for monitoring compliance with state and federal education law, authorizers collect up to 3% of the per-pupil state funding that flows to the charters they oversee. That arrangement creates financial incentives for authorizers to keep schools open, but it also creates accountability obligations. When a school persistently underperforms, the authorizer bears some responsibility for letting it continue.
DPSCD’s board has been wrestling more broadly with its posture toward charters in recent weeks, and the Obama academy discussion sits inside a larger conversation about which schools the district should be willing to stand behind. The board members at Wednesday’s meeting were not shy about where they stand. Moving from an F grade to a D, in their view, is not a turnaround story. It is a school that has not demonstrated it can deliver for the children enrolled.
The stakes for those roughly 300 students are real and immediate. The school’s contract runs through June 30. If no new authorizer picks up the school and no closure plan is formalized, families face uncertainty about where their children will attend school in the fall. Detroit’s school choice environment means options exist, but finding them, applying, and transitioning takes time that a late-spring closure announcement does not provide.
Edgerson’s public criticism of the process itself, specifically the argument that the board acted without all seven members present, is worth examining on its own terms. She is correct that four members is not a full board. Whether that constitutes a procedural problem or simply the reality of how school boards operate with varying attendance is a question the district will need to address if Edgerson or the school’s families push back through formal channels.
What the board members who were present did not do is hide their reasoning. Harris, Vaughn, and McClendon each stated their position directly during the meeting. The grade trajectory they pointed to, F to D, reflects state-assigned school performance scores that Michigan uses to evaluate academic outcomes. A D-grade school is not one in crisis in the same way an F-grade school is, but it is also not a school that has demonstrated it can move students toward proficiency at an acceptable rate. For a school that has been operating since 1997, the board’s frustration with limited progress is understandable.
The African-centric model the school uses serves a community of families who have specifically sought out that approach for their children. That curricular identity matters to the families enrolled, and it complicates a simple closure calculus. A school is not just its test scores. It is also the community it builds, the cultural programming it offers, and the particular needs it meets for the families who chose it. Edgerson’s framing of the school as a community pillar reflects that reality.
But school boards also have a responsibility to weigh that community role against the academic results children are actually receiving. The DPSCD board members who spoke Wednesday appear to have concluded that the balance tips toward closing a door that the school has had nearly three decades to improve on.
Whether Obama Leadership Academy pursues a new authorizer will determine what happens next. Michigan’s authorization landscape includes universities and community colleges that have taken on charters DPSCD has declined to continue. That path is available. It is not guaranteed, and any new authorizer would presumably conduct its own review of the school’s academic record before agreeing to take it on.
For now, the school’s immediate task is communicating clearly with the roughly 300 families whose children attend. Parents need to know their options, the timeline, and whether the school is actively pursuing alternatives. That communication, or the absence of it, will shape how this closure plays out on the ground.
The April board meeting agenda, without a charter renewal vote on it, will tell the final story. Unless something changes in the next few weeks, the board has functionally made its decision. After 29 years on Detroit’s east side, Barack Obama Leadership Academy is approaching the end of its authorization by the city’s public school district.
