Good morning CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to present a Contributor Column from Shaina Cavazos, Director of the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation, and Patrick McAlister, Principal of PM Strategies.
We provide brief bios for Shaina and Patrick below.
Shaina Cavazos is director of the Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation, where she leads Indianapolis’s charter school authorizing portfolio. She was previously a founding and award-winning staff reporter for Chalkbeat Indiana, covering statewide K–12 education policy. Reach her at shaina.cavazos@gmail.com.
Patrick McAlister is principal of PM Strategies and the former director of the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation. He helps charter boards, networks, and authorizers think through closures, mergers, and independence transitions. Reach him at patrick.j.mcalister@gmail.com.
Beyond Replication: What Responsible Charter Growth Looks Like Now
Most conversations about charter growth start with replication. Find a school that works, copy it, and plant it somewhere else. That is what the federal grant programs reward, and what most funders say they want.
The Indianapolis story has gotten national attention for the visible wins, built by mayors, state legislators, and organizations like The Mind Trust. We want to add the part that does not generate headlines: the authorizer’s decisions about which schools merge, which transition to independence, and which close with a plan rather than a crisis.
Replication built the sector. In cities with high concentrations of charter schools, it is not going to grow it from here.
Between us, we have led the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation(OEI) through six charter closures and mergers in the last several years. We are writing this for the boards and networks who are about to face the same decisions, because the way the sector talks about growth right now does not match the choices in front of them. Almost everything written on closures, mergers, and authorizer practice comes from researchers, consultants, and advocates describing the terrain from the outside. We have been in the seat. The sector underuses mergers, and the closures that have to happen land much worse than they need to when nobody has prepared for the families.
Start with the demographics. The U.S. birth rate has fallen from 2.1 children per woman in 2007 to under 1.6 in 2024, the lowest in our history. K–12 enrollment is down more than 1.2 million students since 2019. Charter schools are the one bright spot, the only type of public school still gaining enrollment nationally, but they will feel the demographic shift too. Growth is still possible. It just will not look like the growth that built the sector.
That makes responsible growth the question authorizers and operators have to answer right now. Responsible growth means fitting the tool to the context. Sometimes the answer is a second campus. Sometimes it is adding grades at an existing site. Sometimes it is an independence transition, where a local board takes back work a national manager was doing. Sometimes it is a merger. And sometimes, when a school does need to close, responsible work means planning a soft landing for the kids rather than a hard one. The sector is fluent in the first two tools and barely uses the rest. That has to change.
Marion Academy: Closure as the Responsible Answer
In August of 2019, days before the school year was set to begin, Marion Academy, an alternative school in Indianapolis serving students involved in the criminal justice system, closed. To any outside observer, the closure looked sudden. The school had struggled to recruit students and ran a separate program inside the Marion County Juvenile Detention Center. Enrollment was hard to begin with, and middle and high school are the most expensive grades to serve. By the summer of 2019, the school was in a financial bind.
The board made the right call. A summer closure was the honest answer to finances that no longer added up. But for roughly 120 kids, most of them in or near the juvenile justice system, there was no soft landing.
How it closed is the part we learned from. Some authorizers let schools with extremely tenuous finances open the doors in August anyway, knowing a mid-year collapse is likely. OEI maintains a policy of no mid-year closures, and has for years. That policy meant the Marion board had to decide before the school year, and they did. Once the decision was made, OEI and Enroll Indy worked quickly to place every Marion student before the first day.
Planning for the kids takes everyone at once: the board, the authorizer, other charter networks, and enrollment partners ready to catch students when it matters. That coordination has to start a year before a board vote, not the morning after one. It also has to be somebody’s job, not just a thing everyone hopes happens. After Marion, we built closure planning into the OEI renewal cycle, so that any school we were watching closely had a placement plan in development long before a board had to vote on it. The field does not talk about this work, and will not until it has to.
Victory College Prep: When Independence is the Growth Move
In 2019, two Indianapolis schools managed by the same national network, Lighthouse Academies, went two different ways. One closed. The other left the network and grew. Both were the right answer.
A few months before Marion closed, the board of Indianapolis Lighthouse Charter School voted to shut down its East campus at the end of the 2018–19 school year. Lighthouse East served about 308 students in grades 7–12 on the far east side. It had cycled through three principals in four years, the academic results were not strong, and the projected budget for the coming year had a $600,000 hole. The board, the network that managed it, and OEI all reached the same conclusion at the same time: this was not going to turn around.
That same year, the local board for Indianapolis Lighthouse Charter School decided not to renew its management agreement with Lighthouse Academies. The board had been modifying the national model for years, the network was contributing little to the academic program, and the $750,000-a-year management fee no longer pencilled. National CMOs do not typically let go of schools quietly, but Lighthouse let this one go. The board rebranded as Victory College Prep and took on independent operation. Enrollment held roughly steady, and the staff and leadership continued the academic program they had already been running.
By 2024, enrollment was climbing. By 2025, the VCP board had asked the Indianapolis Charter School Board, which approves new charters to be authorized by OEI, to restructure into three separate charters: a K–5 elementary, a 6–8 middle, and a 9–12 high school. The elementary and middle would stay on their original campus; the high school would move two miles west to a second building. The charter board approved the plan in April 2025. This year, VCP is running three charters on two campuses with combined enrollment of 1,292, a 45% increase from its last year under Lighthouse management.
Our role as the authorizer was different from anything in the standard playbook. There was no match to broker, no closure to plan. The VCP board had already figured out what they wanted to do, and they had the team to do it. What we did was steady, lower-profile work over years: stay close enough to the school to know its leadership and its numbers, ask hard questions during the Lighthouse exit, and move the three-charter restructure through review without losing the ambition that made it worth doing. Recognizing when a board is ready to take a bigger step, and doing the diligence that lets the bigger step go forward fast, is its own craft. It is not getting out of the way.
Andrew J. Brown Academy: When the Merger is the Growth Move
Andrew J. Brown Academy had been operating on Indianapolis’s far east side since 2003, managed by a national charter management organization. By the time its charter came up for renewal, we faced a choice. We could have declined to renew and let the school close. That would have been the easy path. It also would have meant walking away from a school that had built something worth preserving.
Before any of the merger work started, we had to answer a harder question: was AJB worth saving? Some schools should close, and sentiment is not a reason to keep them open. There will always be families and staff and advocates who want a school to continue. That is not enough. The question has to have a measurable answer.
AJB had one. It was one of the oldest charter schools in Indianapolis, with more than twenty years of students and families who had chosen it. It had a track record of academic success in its earlier years, so the case for preserving it rested on more than nostalgia. And its name carried a community identity that mattered: Dr. Andrew J. Brown was a civil rights leader whose legacy the school was built to honor. Closing AJB would have closed a piece of the neighborhood’s history along with the school.
That conviction put an obligation on us as the authorizer. Brokering a merger means knowing both organizations, the school that needs a new structure and the school or network that might take it on, well enough to see whether a match is possible. A partnership where one party is enthusiastic and the other is reluctant becomes a slow-motion breakup. Our job was to know both sides well enough to be honest with both boards about what we were seeing.
Not every authorizer should play this role, and the field is cautious for good reason. The work requires deep enough relationships with both organizations to read each side honestly, no political or financial stake in either outcome, and the standing to be wrong in public when a match does not hold. Without those conditions, the authorizer is not brokering. It is imposing.
We connected the AJB board with Paramount Schools of Excellence, an Indianapolis network with a strong academic record and years of experience running schools in similar communities. Paramount had the academic model, the operational capacity, and a willingness to see the upside even though the merger came with risk. The AJB board had the history, the trust, and the willingness to enter a partnership rather than a takeover. That alignment made the match possible.
What followed was not simple. The AJB board ended a twenty-year management relationship. The school left the building it had occupied for two decades. Enrollment dropped from 570 to 435 in the first year. But the AJB board and Paramount built something new. Paramount purchased the former Indianapolis Public Schools Forest Manor Middle School building for $4.25 million and invested another $6 million in renovations, moving students into the space for the 2024–25 school year. They created a “confer and consent” governance model that gave the AJB board meaningful oversight while plugging into Paramount’s operational infrastructure. Two AJB board members now sit on Paramount’s board, including one permanent legacy seat. AJB grew to 483 students this year, an 11% rebound in its first full year under the new structure.
We took a real risk. If we got it wrong, the cost would land on the AJB board, the staff, and the families, not on us. AJB had to change, and if we could not get the merger done, the same school we were trying to preserve would have closed anyway, just a year or two later and with more damage along the way. The merger could have stalled. Enrollment could have kept falling. The governance model could have cracked. The authorizer who chooses to broker mergers is choosing to be wrong sometimes, in public. That is the trade.
A merger like this needs three things in place, all earlier than anyone thinks they need to be: a board willing to consider that a merger may be the responsible answer for its school, a network willing to take on the risk of inheriting another organization’s history, and an authorizer willing to start the conversation long before there is a deal to facilitate. Sector talk about mergers focuses on the first two: board readiness, network capacity. The third is the one most often missing. Authorizers who only show up for the renewal hearing do not broker mergers. They preside over the closures.
What We Would Tell a Board or Network weighing a Transition
None of these transitions was an authorizer accomplishment. Marion’s placement took Enroll Indy and the charter networks that opened seats for 120 students before the first day of school. VCP’s restructure was years of work by the board and leadership team, with the Indianapolis Charter School Board moving fast enough on review to keep the plan whole. AJB and Paramount did the merger themselves: the governance design, the building purchase, the renovation, and the operational integration. The authorizer makes a few of the calls. The ecosystem makes most of them.
The most fulfilling part of authorizer work is helping new schools start and good schools grow. That is where most of the sector’s energy rightly goes. The most important part of the job, in a sector that has stopped expanding the way it used to, is close monitoring, managing closures well, and brokering partnerships that keep schools going in a different form. It is less glamorous and more painful. An authorizer who runs a portfolio does this work. An authorizer who just holds one does not.
Start the conversation a year before you have to. The worst transitions happen when schools run out of money, time, or both. The best ones happen when a board looks at its enrollment, its finances, and its academic outcomes and says, this is not working, and we owe our families something better. That kind of self-honesty is a leadership skill, and most boards underrate it.
Almost everything else follows from that one habit. A board that is honest with itself early has options. It can ask whether replication is the right path or the wrong one for the community it serves. It can match itself to a partner whose strengths complement its own, the way VCP’s board read its own capacity and AJB’s board read Paramount’s. It can protect what is worth protecting in a merger by negotiating from a position of choice instead of distress. The boards that wait for the crisis to make the decision for them lose all of those options at once.
Mergers fail when one party feels absorbed rather than joined. We have seen the pattern often enough to recognize the warning signs early. One party enters needing a rescue, the other enters needing a win. Nobody does the work of preserving the weaker partner’s identity. The stronger party’s team never fully buys in at the school level. Those mergers look fine on the day they close and fall apart inside eighteen months.
The mergers that work do something different. They preserve the things that gave the absorbed school a reason to exist in the first place. With AJB and Paramount, that meant a permanent board seat, the AJB name on the building, and a governance arrangement where the legacy board still has a voice in what the school becomes. Those choices were not sentimentality. They were the structural recognition that a school is its community before it is its operator, and a merger that forgets that is a closure with extra steps.
What this Asks of Authorizers, and Invites from Networks
Most authorizers in places like Indianapolis see the full local picture: enrollment trends, financial position, and academic data across dozens of schools. We know which operators have capacity to take on more students and which do not. That information is only useful when we use it to start conversations early, while boards still have options. Used late, the same information is only a record of what we did not prevent.
The Indianapolis story has gotten national attention, much of it led by The Mind Trust and its partners: the growth of high-performing schools, the district-charter partnerships, the research on student outcomes, and the phenomenal wins for charter funding. Indianapolis’s charter sector is largely built on those conditions. We want to add a piece of the same story that does not generate headlines: the authorizer decisions about which schools would merge, which would transition to independence, and which would close with a plan rather than a crisis. That work happens in the year before a school’s finances become untenable, in conversations between boards and authorizers who are both tracking what is coming.
The strongest networks already know which of their schools are full, which of their leaders are ready for more, and which communities nearby could use what they do. VCP’s board asked those questions and decided they were ready to leave a national manager. Paramount asked them and decided a merger with AJB was worth doing. Neither move was forced on either organization, and that is most of the reason they worked.
The next phase of growth will not look like the last one. Do not wait for a replication RFP to tell you what comes next. Look at your own roster, look at the schools around you, and decide on your own terms.
Replication built the sector. Judgment is what grows it from here.