The founders of a District charter school have been in an escalating feud with the school’s board of directors over control of the Northeast campus that has spawned a lawsuit and prompted a judge to slap the school’s former principal with a restraining order. But as the battle over William E. Doar Jr. Public Charter School for the Performing Arts heads for a Superior Court hearing Thursday, the founders, the William E. Doar, Jr. Educational Foundation, now say they will quit the fight.
“It’s in the best interest of the school and the students, we feel at this point,” attorney Julius Terrell said Tuesday. “It’s better to have stability.”
It’s a stark turnaround after months of infighting between the school’s board of directors and its founders, who in May claimed that they had dissolved the board of directors.
In the letter, Mary Robbins, former principal of the upper school, along with founders Nadia Casseus-Torney and Julie S. Doar-Sinkfield, charged the board chairman with “blurring the lines between management and governance of the current board as evidenced by … his attempts to influence day to day operations, oversee personnel and management decisions around attendance, creation of a hostile work place and the attempt to exercise line item approval over school based expenditures.”
The founders then told parents and teachers to ignore an emergency meeting called by the directors, dubbing it an “unauthorized and uninsured meeting of former Board members,” according to the lawsuit.
When Doar was founded in 2004 under a K-12 charter, the Educational Foundation held authority over the school’s board of directors. But the Educational Foundation’s corporate status was revoked in 2009 after it failed to file the appropriate papers and fees with the city, making the organization defunct, the school’s board argued.
On June 10, a Superior Court judge issued a restraining order against the founders forbidding them any involvement with the school until Thursday’s hearing.
Spokeswoman Audrey Williams said the D.C. Public Charter School Board supports the school’s board of directors. She pointed to provisions in the D.C. School Reform Act requiring all public charter schools to be ruled by a board of trustees “in a manner consistent with the charter granted to the school.”
The charter school board gave Doar a year’s conditional continuation when it came up for review earlier this year. It was allowed to continue, in part, because the school had decided to close its lagging high school, which Robbins led, and operate as a K-8 campus.
Stephen Marcus, an attorney for the school, said the charter school board’s decision “is a sign of confidence that the school will be able to run itself competently.”
