Appellate Court backs Chicago Public Schools’ decision not to renew Urban Prep charter: ‘It is sad and unfair’

Just before the end of the school year in June, Lisa Brown washed, dried and neatly folded up her son’s Urban Prep Academy uniforms, well worn after four years at the once-esteemed all-boys high school.

“I took them to the school for students that may be coming next school year and need uniforms to wear because, as far as I was concerned, everything was OK,” Brown said.

But last Thursday, just days before graduation, the institution was dealt a blow by an Appellate Court in Illinois’ 1st Judicial District, which ruled that Chicago Public Schools did not violate the 2021 moratorium on school closures when it voted not to renew the charter contracts for Urban Prep Academies two South Side high schools.

The decision puts a wrench in Urban Prep officials’ two-year battle with CPS, which revoked the charter of the school’s Bronzeville and Englewood campuses in October 2022 following a long line of missteps.

An investigation that same year by the Office of the Inspector General, the district’s watchdog, substantiated misconduct allegations against the charter network’s former CEO, Tim King, and found multiple violations related to governance.

The investigation also found that only one-third of Urban Prep teachers are certified and the charter failed to provide adequate special education services for disabled students.

In a court filing last year, Urban Prep insisted that CPS violated the moratorium when it revoked their charter, but a Circuit Court judge said that the Illinois law does not apply to charter schools. Soon after, Urban Prep filed the appeal, which the state’s appellate court upheld.

In a statement, CPS officials said the judge’s ruling does not immediately impact Urban Prep’s current students.

“District officials and the Chicago Board of Education will review this ruling and determine a path forward that best supports our students,” CPS said in an email Wednesday. “The District will take all necessary steps to ensure clear communication and engagement with impacted families prior to bringing forward any possible recommendations regarding this charter to the Board of Education.”

Rulings made by the state’s appellate courts can be appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court. Urban Prep did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Lisa’s son, Myles Brown, was awarded valedictorian of Urban Prep in Bronzeville on June 8 and is headed to Tuskegee University in Tuskegee Alabama, this fall. Lisa said she has high hopes for her son’s future but struggles to put into words what the loss of Urban Prep means to the community.

“I’m speechless,” she said. “I feel that it is sad and unfair — CPS has not, cannot and will not ever be able to replicate the students that Urban Prep produced.”

Myles said he hopes the 300-plus students currently enrolled at Urban Prep don’t just “get integrated into a regular CPS school.”

“At Urban Prep, everybody wore a uniform but at the same time you were able to be yourself. You were able to express yourself as a young man, and I feel as though with CPS’ track record (students) are not going to get the same quality,” he said. “I made a lot of connections with my classmates — sophomores, freshmen and juniors. I would really hate for them to have to transition into another environment that may not be well suited for them.”

Gina Caneva, a former high school English teacher who taught at Team Englewood, a small CPS’ school that shared a building with Urban Prep said the school emerged during a 2010 movement to create nearly 100 new schools, mostly charters, to replace failing schools. The initiative was the brainchild of former Mayor Richard M. Daley and then-CPS CEO Arne Duncan.

Many high schools created under this initiative were intentionally small, Caneva said, and the theory was that smaller schools would allow for stronger relationships, preventing students from falling behind.

“Urban Prep did highlight that young black men do fall through the cracks and there’s a way we have to lift them out which I think is is great,” Caneva said, adding that charter schools like Urban Prep function under a “business model,” which isn’t conducive to the benefits of a public school education.

The academy was surrounded by fanfare, according to Caneva, being championed by famous donors and visited several times by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“For a while, Oprah was giving them millions of dollars, people were just funding them and I was in the same building getting the regular CPS (funds) and we saw how much outside money could really help a public school, but at the same time I didn’t think that was fair,” Caneva said. “But the downfall saddens me.”

Caneva said enrollment should be measured alongside student success.

According to the Illinois Report Card, Urban Prep had 217 students enrolled in the Bronzeville campus in 2023 and 155 students at its Englewood campus. For comparison, enrollment at the Bronzeville campus hovered around 330 in pre-pandemic 2019, while Englewood had 258 students.

“Once high school enrollment drops past 600, you’re really not getting a good robust high school experience that other kids are getting elsewhere,” Caneva said.

Like many, she said, Caneva wanted Urban Prep to succeed because it fostered academic excellence for young Black men. The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that Black men have the lowest college graduation rate of any racial or gender group at 34%.

Last June, Dennis Lacewell, chief academic officer for Urban Prep, told the Tribune that Urban Prep’s commitment to making sure its seniors had achievable postgraduate plans was a big part of its success and what set them apart from the typical public school model, citing the charter’s 90% high school graduation rate, compared with CPS’ 65% high school graduation rate for Black male students.

In his energetic valedictorian speech on Saturday, Myles called out the turbulent nature of the last four years, including the COVID-19 pandemic that uprooted his freshman year.

“Not everyday was sunshine and rainbows yet the days where moments of joy and celebration and academic progress occurred, overshadowed those bad days,” he said. “The majority of our time here was spent taking care of business and most importantly, creating new experiences and bonds with one another that will serve us for the rest of our lives.”