Superintendent: Charter School Should Close

Bethlehem Area School Superintendent Joseph Roy told school board members Monday night that he is hoping the embattled in Bethlehem will ultimately submit to an “orderly closing,” rather than go through a protracted battle to keep its doors open.

“It’s a school that clearly needs to be closed,” said Roy, though he is reluctant to go down the same road as Allentown School District officials, who last week began openly discussing charter revocation.

“I don’t want to have to spend the dollars needed to go through a revocation hearing,” Roy told the board. “Taxpayer money is already not being well spent. Apparently.”

The school, which was built to serve children with learning, physical and emotional disabilities, is awash in financial troubles, which has apparently undermined its ability to provide services to its clients, according to a five-month investigation conducted by the Allentown School District, as described in published reports by The Morning Call and The Express Times.

Among the concerns described:

• Some of its 120 students are not getting legally mandated special education services.
• None of the students are getting the required classroom time.
• Staff has at times gone without being paid.
• Colonial Intermediate Unit 20 has threatened to withhold services for occupational and physical therapy for lack of payment.
• The school has a mortgage on a building that it apparently does not have the money to pay.

The school serves children from across the Lehigh Valley, though Allentown sends more students to the school than anyone, according to Roy. Ten of the school’s children are from the .

Roy said he would like to see the children reintegrated with their home school districts in what he described as an “orderly closing.”

The Bethlehem Area School Board denied charter renewal for the school more than two years ago, but the Pennsylvania Department of Education overturned that decision, Roy said.

“Let the PDE solve it,” said board member Eugene McKeon.