by Geoff Kelly

It was the week before their spring break, and the teachers and students at Sankofa Charter School had pressed every flat surface in the building into service. In classrooms, in the library, even at the conference tables outside the principal’s office, the kids were drilling in preparation for their state math and language arts exams.

The students—fifth through eighth graders, almost all African American and 90 percent of them from families living at poverty level or below, attending a troubled school in a hard-luck neighborhood, located in shoestring facilities in a decrepit, nearly abandoned East Side shopping plaza that by itself speak volumes about race and economics in Buffalo—were driven to study especially hard this spring for several reasons.

One of these is certainly self-improvement. Another, no doubt, is the promise of an mp3 player to students who improve on last year’s scores.

A third motivation is more desperate: If Sankofa’s students didn’t post truly impressive scores on state exams this spring, the school would close in June and its 195 students would scatter to whatever public, private or charter schools could accept them.

Sankofa is in the fifth year of its initial five-year charter. In January the the Charter Schools Institute (CSI), which oversees and evaluates charter schools for New York State’s Board of Regents, recommended that the Regents deny the school’s request for a three-year extension of that charter, citing poor test scores over the school’s first four years and insufficient progress in its fifth year to suggest a reasonable probability that the school would turn things around.

Closure is an outcome that those directly associated with the school—students, faculty, administrators, trustees—would consider a travesty.

“The students are happy here, the parents are happy,” says developer Sam Savarino, who became chairman of Sankofa’s board of trustees last spring, when it seemed as if the school would not even stay open for the fifth year of its charter. “If this school closes and goes away, you’re not going to find someone else opening a charter school for middle school students in this neighborhood, serving this community. Not only that, the kids already here are going to be poorly served if the school closes.”

So the students, teachers and administrators went to work, hoping to achieve test scores that would convince the Board of Regents to revisit its decision.

The testing was completed two weeks ago. Sankofa teachers believe their students have succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. The school, acknowledging that it will take the state four months to release the official test scores, released a cautious statement:

“We are confident of a significant improvement in our ELA scores. We also remain optimistic the State Education Department at the conclusion of their statistical computations will increase our overall ELA scores officially. With regard to our recent math testing…[t]he scoring process is ongoing. Hopefully, we will be able to generalize positive math outcomes…with our improved ELA scores.”

That cautious statement in no way reflects the optimism displayed by faculty and staff at Sankofa. They believe their kids knocked the ball out of the park. That’s the good news. Whether the news that follows is good or bad remains to be seen.

“There are no more appeals left for the school to make,” says Cynthia Proctor, a spokesperson for CSI. Proctor says that the Regents have affirmed and reaffirmed the decision to close Sankofa. She says that new test results have no bearing on that decision. “There will always be a new set of test scores that come out long after after a decision not to renew has been made,” Proctor says.

In a statement explaining the decision to close the school, CSI’s Dr. Jennifer G. Sneed said, “Our mandate is that it is simply not acceptable for a school to under-perform its local district, or even to outperform a struggling district…

“We recognize the passion that Sankofa’s school leaders, trustees, staff, parents and students have for their school. note the recent renewed energy of school trustees and administrators, and are aware of the enhancements made in school culture and classroom behavior as a result. Unfortunately, this renewed passion and energy—in the Institute’s opinion—did not have a tangible impact on the effectiveness of the school’s academic program.”

Sankofa’s board, faculty and staff are certain that the new test scores will prove that assessment incorrect, and are lobbying the Regents to accept last month’s scores as evidence of a dramatic turnaround—in some cases a near doubling of student achievement, according to teachers at Sankofa—in just six months of class-time.

The test scores will not be ratified and released by the state for a couple months. By the time the expected good news of Sankofa’s turnaround is sanctioned, the school will be closed and parents will have enrolled their children in new schools for the fall. So Sankofa is asking the Regents for a reprieve, pendng the release of those scores, and then a new hearing on the school’s future.

“We’re not asking for any grand consideration,” Savarino says. “We’re just asking for some fair consideration. We’re not asking for a five-year renewal. Give us a probationary renewal.”

The writing has been on the wall for Sankofa since last spring, when CSI filed the latest in a four-year string of negative evaluations of the school’s performance. In its first four years, the school had been administered KIPP—the Knowledge Is Power Program—a national education company that runs 57 charter schools in 17 states, many of them in underserved, predominantly African-American neighborhoods like Buffalo’s East Side. In addition to a rigorous curriculum, KIPP’s educational philosophy emphasizes discipline and character-building, as well as long hours in school.

From the start, however, KIPP’s stewardship of Sankofa was characterized by an unruly student body beset by disciplinary problems. And the students’ test scores were terribly disappointing, sometimes lower than those at Buffalo Public Schools.

By year four, KIPP was ready to wash its hands of the school, which both KIPP and CSI deemed a failure. The school owed KIPP close to $300,000—a loan the company had made to cover the school’s expenses—but the school had sufficient cash reserves to pay off that debt if the school closed in June 2007. So KIPP’s only remaining stake in Sankofa was its reputation.

By the time Savarino attended his first trustees meeting, the head of the school had resigned. KIPP’s two board members were talking about pulling their affiliation and closing the school. The school, it seemed, was dead on its feet.

At the same time, the school’s first graduates were moving on to high school. Some won scholarships to attend private schools. There seemed a glimmer of the possibility of success. Whatever Sankofa’s failings under KIPP, parents and students saw the charter school as preferable to district schools.

Some of the school’s trustees decided with concerned parents to carry on without KIPP. They reconstituted the board, adding new trustees. They replaced the departing principal with Dr. Josephine Mayfield, an infectiously energetic 25-year veteran of Buffalo Public Schools. Mayfield hired Tiffany Thomas as parent and community liaison, to convince parents to keep their kids in Sankofa for one more year—a task she performed by walking door to door all summer long. (Thomas retained nearly all of Sankofa’s students, impressing even CSI, which seemed to consider the school’s closing a fait accompli.) Mayfield brought in former LaSalle High School basketball star Tim Winn as dean of students, to keep the kids in line. She hired a host of new teachers and developed a strategy for engaging students and improving performance.

“We started by asking, ‘How can we educate these students on who they are, on how they’re special and why they’re great,’” Mayfield explains. “And then Mr. Winn deals with when they don’t realize that, and he tries to give them a reality check about ‘Yes, you can do this and you’re gonna do this.’”

Savarino and his reinvigorated board filed a plan with the Board of Regents explaining how the new regime intended to set the school on a new course. The trustees asked that the new Sankofa be judged on its own merits, separate from KIPP’s record. But when CSI visited the school last October, Sankofa’s new school leaders were told they would be held responsible for KIPP’s record as well.

According to Savarino, “They said, ‘We’re not going to base your charter renewal on any turnaround you’ve had in a short period of time. We’re going to base it on what you’ve had over the full four years.’”

According to Proctor, CSI’s recommendation in January to deny renewal had to do with the school’s failure to implement parts of its recovery plan: The proposed curriculum has never been fully realized, according to CSI; teacher training programs that were promised have not materialized; promised library materials and laptops for students had not been acquired; tutoring programs had not started; the list of lapses continues.

As for the most rigid standard CSI uses to evaluate schools—that 75 percent of students must show competency on the state’s math and language arts exams—CSI referred to the poor scores under the KIPP regime, and said the failure to implement elements of the transition plan left them little confidence that scores would improve over the long term.

“That’s a bit of a canard anyway,” Savarino says, pointing out that the state average for charter schools is 62 percent competency. At public schools it’s far worse, and Buffalo schools have some of the lowest competency scores in the state. “Nobody’s coming up to the standards. If that was the rationale, most of the schools in Buffalo would probably be shut down.”

But most schools aren’t being shut down. Sankofa, on the city’s beleagured East Side, is.

“Psychologically this is a burden placed on students who are very accustomed to losing, to not having enough,” says Maurice Curlee, a social worker who serves as the school’s counselor.

Curlee explains that there are plenty of poor and African-American parents who don’t get involved with their children’s education schools because their own institutional experiences are either traumatic or filled with loss and denial of opportunity. They have little faith in schools.

“If we go away quietly into the night, they don’t care,” Curlee says, because the loss will seem of a piece with the world as it is generally experienced by the community Sankofa serves.

Under Mayfield, Sankofa has become a second home to its students, Curlee says, one that holds out a promise that effort will be rewarded. If that promise isn’t kept, a new generation will bear the same scars as their parents.

Irving Salter’s daughter, Brea, came to Sankofa as a fifth grader. He sees how important the school has become for her: “Even when she has a cold she wants to come here. She likes it here,” Salter says. “She feels comfortable here. She’s learning here. my daughter has really excelled at this school.”

Curlee says that charter schools expect new ideas to bear fruit four years after they’re implemented. KIPP had four years and failed. “This is our first year,” Curlee says, and. “All we’re asking is, ‘Let us show you what we can continue to do.’”

There are plenty of arguments to be made that charter schools, in general, do great harm to the effort to improve public schools—that they represent a surrender a redirection of scarce resources rather than a new tool in the battle to reform the education system. But in the specific case of Sankofa, those public policy arguments seem distant and irrelevant: Any institution that reaches out to students in Buffalo’s most undeserved communities ought to be given a break.

“I hope this situation turns around,” Salter says. “It will be tragic if this school closes.”