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Monday, August 1, 2005
Detroit Public Schools CEO William F. Coleman III announced today that the District will not issue a contract to operate a public school academy or charter school from the former St. Martin DePorres Catholic High School, which the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit had planned to close at the end of the 2004-05 school year.
“After a painstaking analysis and review, we have concluded that serving as the chartering agency for St. Martin DePorres will not be in our best interests,” said William F. Coleman III, CEO of Detroit Public Schools.
District officials had been having discussions with representatives of the Catholic school in the course of the last several weeks. DePorres officials had approached DPS about the possibility of reopening in the fall as a non sectarian school that would be chartered by the District. Much of the talk centered on keeping DePorres a high school and limiting its enrollment to 250 students and prevented DePorres from enrolling or recruiting DPS students.
In the discussions, District officials quickly rejected a request by De Porres officials to increase enrollment by 110 students for fear that the majority of those students would come from DPS, which has had struggles with recruiting and retaining students in recent years. The District also sought to insert language into the proposed contract with DePorres that would have capped enrollment at 250.
However, the District decided not to grant the charter after concluding that such an agreement would likely not withstand legal challenges.
“When we were first approached about chartering DePorres, we saw it as a great strategic move for us,” said Coleman III. “We were concerned that the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit might sell the building to another chartering agency that would take students from us. We also saw this as an opportunity to control the school, limit its enrollment and generate additional revenue. However, we cannot in good conscience move forward on this agreement at this time because we think it could come back and hurt us. We did not think we could create any fail safe methods that would not have a negative impact on DPS enrollment. We also did not think the proposed language could hold up in court – if it ever came to that. Our overriding interest is in retaining the students we have and getting those we’ve lost to the charters to come back home to DPS.”
