Students at Downtown College Preparatory face uncertainty as the Santa Clara County charter school prepares to close after nearly 25 years, laying off about 100 staff and impacting 950 students. (Kori Suzuki/KQED)
Updated 1:02 p.m. Monday
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.”
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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 is a fantastic organization and was the original charter school in San José, and it is with great sadness that we’re in this position,” Valerie Royaltey-Quandt, DCP’s interim executive director, said Monday. “And we know that there are a lot of other schools in this situation in our area.”
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.
Downtown College Prep will close its two middle schools and one high school in June, citing declining enrollment and a $4.5 million budget deficit — less than a year after abruptly shutting its Alum Rock campus. (Getty Images)
“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 serve 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. At its peak, DCP had about 1,600 students, Royaltey-Quandt said.
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.
About 850 students will need to find new schools, which Royaltey-Quandt said the school has been supporting heavily.
“We started having planning meetings with parents, with students through our curriculum advisory program. We had a very large high school and middle school fair and invited all of our local charter schools and private schools, and we had a good turnout for that,” she said.
DCP officials have also been working with local public school districts to verify that transfers of student records are going smoothly, and sending families surveys as well as checking in with parents directly about every two weeks to offer support.
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.”
The closure of Downtown College Preparatory’s El Primero Middle School marks a heartbreaking loss for the Alum Rock and Downtown San José communities, especially for students and staff who recently transferred from Alum Rock High. (Getty Images)
“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, and Royaltey-Quandt later took his place.
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.
“The expectation and the budgeting forecasting at that time was that DCP would continue to stabilize and even increase in enrollment,” Royaltey-Quandt said. “And of course, we know in this area, especially post-COVID, our school-age students have been in decline. So all of those factors really contributed to us not being able to pay what we needed to on the debt owed regarding the bond.”
She said that with the coming closures of all DCP schools, the organization will be in default on its bonds, and the bondholders will likely sell the property to cover the remaining debt.
“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.
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.
