The legitimacy of the process that led to the Maury County School Board‘s rejection Tuesday evening in a close 6 to 5 vote of American Classical Education‘s (ACE) application to open and operate a public charter school in the county was challenged on Wednesday when ACE CEO Joel Schellhammer called into question the originality of Maury County Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Ventura‘s report assessing ACE’s American Classical Academy Maury’s (ACAM) application.
In Tuesday’s board meeting, Ventura, who chairs the Maury County Review Committee set up to give its recommendation to the school board on whether it should approve or deny ACE’s application, presented the findings of that committee to the board. The Review Committee recommended the initial application’s denial because it claimed ACE only partially met the criteria of its rubric. ACE may return to the board in 30 days with an amended application for another chance at approval.
At the Tuesday night meeting, Ventura presented a summary of the Review Committee’s report in a PowerPoint to the board and citizens in attendance.
But in an email sent to Ventura on Wednesday, ACE CEO Schellhammer noted that the PowerPoint presentation, “contained significant and repeated examples of plagiarism taken from reviews of other applications, specifically Clarksville-Montgomery and Rutherford County. These examples range from entire slides being copied to specific deficiencies cut and pasted into the Academic, Operations and Financial sections.” (emphasis added)
As a result, says Schellhammer, ACE is “highly concerned about the integrity of the Maury County School Review Committee’s evaluation of [its] application.”
Maury County School Board Member Steve McGee told The Tennessee Star on Thursday that “there’s a good possibility it could have affected the outcome [of the vote] had we known everything that was available.”
Schellhammer included a document in his email to Ventura highlighting the many overlaps between the Maury County Review Committee’s presentation and those from other districts. He also noted in his email that ACE does not know who is responsible for this. The Review Committee that issued the report was comprised primarily of Maury County School administrators but also included Maury County School Board member Wayne Lindsey.
“By state law, the rubric is required. The Review Committee put a lot of time and effort of working on that. The work that the committee did was good work,” Lindsey told The Star on Friday.
Maury County School Board Chairman Michael Fulbright told The Star on Friday, “I have wanted the process to remain totally focused on the application, and let it stand on its own merits. Opinions or emotions are irrelevant.”
Tricia Stickle, the Maury County Representative for the ACE Board, told The Star, “given what has occurred, I don’t feel as sure that [ACAM] is going to get a fair shake.”
These irregularities led to considerable confusion as to how ACE should proceed, Schellhammer noted.
“As an applicant who wants to amend our application to meet the standard, we are unsure whether we should respond to 1.) only the points that appear to have been genuinely raised by the Review Committee, 2.) all points (including points that were clearly raised for applications written for Rutherford and Clarksville-Montgomery), or 3.) points that were originally included in the presentation but now no longer appear in the document,” Schellhammer wrote in his email to Ventura.
The discrepancies referenced in the third point are changes identified in the PowerPoint between its original uploading and its showing on Tuesday. Changes to the PowerPoint included “the removal of references to American Classical Academy Rutherford (ACAR) and the deletion of application deficiencies listed in both the Academic and Operations sections.”
Tricia Stickle seconded Schellhammer’s confusion: “What am I responding to? Was that our deficiency, or was that Rutherford’s deficiency?”
Beyond plagiarism, Schellhammer also identified potential collusion between the Maury County Review Committee and those in other counties, namely Rutherford. The Rutherford Review Committee did not upload their report until after the Maury Committee uploaded theirs along with Tuesday’s meeting agenda. Schellhammer said that this leaves “no possibility that the Review Committee could have discussed these without collusion.”
Ventura responded via email to Schellhammer on Thursday, stating that allegations of plagiarism in the development of the Review Committee’s report are “patently false.”
“[T]he presentations of CMCSS [Clarksville-Montgomery County School System] and RCS [Rutherford County Schools] were not copyrighted, nor marked as the educational property of said district,” Ventura wrote. She asserted the Review Committee is “able to review the websites & responses from other school districts. This is not collusion, this is collaboration.”
This is not the first controversy Ventura has been involved in during her eleven month tenure as superintendent of Maury County Public Schools. The Maury County School Board promoted Dr. Ventura to superintendent in May of last year after she had served as interim superintendent for two months, as the Columbia Daily Herald reported:
In an unprecedented move, the Maury County Board of Education unanimously voted to cease its search for a new superintendent, divert from board policy and name its current interim chief as the school districts next chief administrator.
Lisa Ventura, Ed.D., will now serve as the school district’s next superintendent after taking on the role of interim in March.
Ventura’s appointment was a departure from Board policy, which says that an acting interim superintendent can not apply for the open full-time position. She was the Special Education and Federal Programs Supervisor in Marshall County before transferring to Maury County in 2012 to become Director of Special Education.
On Thursday, The Star submitted a Public Records Request seeking all email, text, and phone communications regarding the charter school application review process from Ventura to directors and staff in the four other counties that received ACE applications. The Star also seeks related communications between members of the Review Committee in Maury County and those in the other counties in that Public Records Request.
The ACE application to open and operate a public charter school in Rutherford County was approved by the Rutherford County Schools Board of Education on Tuesday night in a 5 to 2 vote. Similar ACE applications were denied this week in Robertson County, Clarksville-Montgomery County, and Jackson-Madison County.
Read Schellhammer’s document highlighting the Maury County Review Committee’s areas of overlap with Review Committee findings in other counties in which ACE has sought public charter school application approval:
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[Editor’s Note: American Classical Education is an advertiser with The Tennessee Star]
Mac Roberts is a reporter at The Tennessee Star. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Phil Schwenk Addresses Maury County School Board” by Mac Roberts.
I wish I could say that this is a surprise. Academic Administration has no interest in education of children. They are concerned only with the money they put in their pockets and the power the wield over others.