Santa Clara County’s First Charter School to Close All Campuses, Laying Off 100 Staff

About 100 teachers and staff at Santa Clara County’s first charter school received layoff notices in late April, as the school prepares to shutter its three remaining schools at the end of the school year due to financial strain and declining enrollment.

Sal Williams, an English teacher at Downtown College Preparatory’s El Primero Middle School, one of the three schools, said that while the educators are likely to find other jobs, the closure of the schools after nearly 25 years is heartbreaking for the Alum Rock and Downtown San José communities.

“DCP has been such a wonderful gift to both this side of San José, as well as the Alum Rock community. It’s offered a lot of underrepresented students a chance to thrive,” he told KQED. “It’s been really great both to see how it helps the immediate community, but also the larger community of teachers as well as students, and I think it’s just going to be a huge, huge loss.”

Downtown College Prep announced in January that it would close its two middle schools and one high school in June due to decreasing enrollment at its campuses and in San José’s public schools. The decision came less than a year after DCP abruptly closed its Alum Rock High School last spring, giving families just a few months’ notice.

DCP has a budget deficit of $4.5 million, according to public documents.

“The organization has taken significant steps to mitigate the situation over the last 12-18 months, including the closure of one high school, staff reductions and discussions with debt holders,” the school’s board wrote in a message shared with the school community in January.

“Unfortunately, with the current limited financial resources and considering the overall trend of lower enrollment in San José, the board made the extremely difficult decision to close all three schools at the end of the 2024-2025 school year,” the message continued.

The three schools served about 950 students in grades 5 through 12. More than 90% of each campus identify as Hispanic or Latino and more than 80% of students qualify as low-income.

Williams, who also serves as the president of the school’s teachers union, said DCP was unique in San José, offering students who don’t traditionally have access to small learning environments the chance to foster closer relationships with classmates and teachers.

“It just helps to personalize education,” he said. “Being in such a small setting, you really get to see these students as people and connect with them that way. That’s just how I like to be as an educator, but I think students really respond to it that their teachers and educators and staff members and admin — everyone knows them as people first.”

It’s especially devastating, Williams said, for teachers and students who transferred into El Primero High School from Alum Rock High this year.

“We were able to absorb some of the teachers and some of the students and for them to have to go through this again… I teach juniors and seniors, so I have some students who have lost two schools in the span of their high school career,” he said.

The schools struggled financially since at least the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortly after employees unionized in 2020 — a rare feat for charter staff — they began to raise concerns about some of DCP’s funding.

As members began trying to track DCP’s finances, Williams said they started to think more and more that, “It doesn’t seem like we’re operating in the green.”

“It kind of came to a head last year … that the organization had a huge fiscal deficit,” he told KQED.

Last March, the union passed a vote of no confidence in Pete Settelmeyer, the CEO at the time, citing fiscal mismanagement and the abrupt Alum Rock High closure. Settelmeyer resigned months later.

In addition to dwindling enrollment-based funding, DCP has struggled to make up for its reliance on one-time COVID-19 relief funding and the $30 million it owes on bonds used for major construction the school began in 2015.

“What really sank our organization are these crazy bonds they took out in order to move two schools, including the one I’m working at, into the old Southern Lumber site… and then renovate what we’ve called the ‘Super Gym,’ a gymnasium over at the Alum Rock site,” Williams said.

DCP made a deal with the San José Unified School District 10 years ago to lease a 3.4-acre property on Monterey Road, which now houses its administrative offices along with El Camino Middle School and El Primero High School, for just $1 per year.

The school was issued $34 million in bonds to significantly renovate the property, according to board documents.

“Taking out huge bonds on buildings that we can’t pay for, I mean, I’m not a real estate person, but it’s not a business move I would ever make,” Williams said.

DCP’s interim Executive Director Valerie Royaltey-Quandt and school representatives did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

Williams told KQED the closures signal a need to reevaluate the charter system.

“We need to take a little bit of a closer look at how charter schools are run, because this is something that you just don’t see in the traditional public school,” he said.

KQED’s Joseph Geha contributed to this report.