The school, Academic Leadership Charter School, opened in 2009 and is the first New York City charter to be disciplined for violating the rules for random admissions.
The violations go to the crux of the debate over charters, which are publicly financed but independently operated. Random admissions is a key tenet in most states, but critics have long contended that the schools surreptitiously weed out students who are unlikely to do well on standardized tests or are more difficult to educate.
In a letter sent to Academic Leadership’s board on Tuesday, the executive director of the city’s charter school office, Recy Dunn, accused the school of twice violating state admissions laws, and described a school in chaos from “a pattern of failed operational oversight by school leadership.”
Besides the admissions problems, the city found that two former staff members may have stolen from the school. The Department of Labor is also investigating Academic Leadership’s hiring practices, and the school is being audited by the city for unpaid food bills.
At most city charter schools, students are selected at public meetings where applicants’ names are picked from a box. But city officials found that at Academic Leadership, which has about 200 children in kindergarten through second grade, hundreds of applicants were left out of this year’s drawing. The lottery was supervised not by an impartial observer, but by a member of the parent association, the letter said. And while students who applied after the lottery should have been added to the waiting list, scores of them were not, it said.
“They are treating it like it’s a private school on the Upper East Side,” said a former school employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “Like people are applying to Dalton. This isn’t Dalton.”
In a similar case, a charter school in Albany was caught last year weeding out applicants who performed poorly on a reading test or had learning disabilities or behavioral issues. That school, Albany Preparatory Charter School, was placed on probation and its principal was replaced, but it eventually had its charter renewed for three years.
Putting Academic Leadership on probation means the school could be closed if it does not follow the city’s recommendations, which included revamping the lottery process, hiring a director of operations and having more frequent board meetings.
The city began investigating admissions practices at Academic Leadership after an article in May by this reporter on Gotham Schools, a Web site that covers New York City education. City officials said they found no evidence that the school’s staff was skimming higher-performing students off the top of the applicant pool, and said that any possible testing of applicants prior to the lottery appeared to be accidental.
But city investigators interviewed only current Academic Leadership employees and members of its board. Interviews with five former employees and seven parents who applied to the school, along with documents they provided, point to a system of inappropriately testing students or reviewing their previous school files, with those who did not meet the standards of the principal, Norma Figueroa-Hurwitz, being shut out.
Charley Grant, who was Dr. Figueroa-Hurwitz’s executive assistant for the school’s first year, said in an e-mail message that she “ordered her educational staff to carry out the testing, would issue an order about whether a student was to be granted admission to the school, and would order the administrative staff to carry out the order.” He added, “If the city had asked me, I would have told them that.”
A former teacher who provided The New York Times with copies of several students’ applications said one of them was turned away because his report card from another school indicated that he was disruptive in class and careless in his homework.
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