New Song Academy’s impending closure marks the end of a three-generation tradition in the Stevenson family.

Shawntay Stevenson, 39, graduated from the small school in Sandtown-Winchester 25 years ago and sent all three of her sons there; her father, Sean, was the basketball coach there until he died in 2022. It’s been her “ray of sunlight in a dark place,” where kids from a low-income neighborhood learn in small classes with support from a close-knit community of teachers and volunteers.

“New Song has meant opportunities that I never thought were possible. New Song is family,” Stevenson said.

With little warning, the safe haven for 182 kids — including Stevenson’s seventh grader — is shutting down, and no one wants to take the blame.

Baltimore City Public Schools officials say the nonprofit that operates New Song hid the extent of its financial woes, a heap of debt that left little choice but to close. The nonprofit’s former executive director, Jayson J. Green, blames its board for going silent when he asked for help.

Meanwhile, one of the last remaining board members said, if Green had kept it better informed of the severity of the debt, donations could have saved the school.

The mess has blindsided students and parents.

The blame game

New Song was founded in 1994 by Susan and Allan Tibbels, and it became one of Baltimore’s first “new schools,” an early version of a charter school overseen by a nonprofit. It started as a 25-student middle school that built homework time into the school day and didn’t give out traditional grades, according to Baltimore Sun reporting at the time. The school district provided teachers, and the nonprofit New Song Community Learning Center ran it. New Song eventually added elementary grades.

Stevenson spoke fondly of her time in New Song’s children’s choir, singing up and down the East Coast and at inaugurations for former Mayor Kurt Schmoke and Gov. Martin O’Malley. She got environmental lessons from the same “garden ladies” at the Irvine Nature Center who would later teach her sons.

The school’s small size “gave us the opportunity to actually learn without a lot of distractions,” said Richard McCarter Jr., a member of New Song’s first preschool class who has worked or volunteered there since graduating in the early 2000s. “It gave teachers a chance to really be able to connect with each student.”

In 2020, New Song became a charter school, privately operated but publicly funded based on the number of students enrolled. The nonprofit operator is responsible for expenses such as building upkeep, and it must submit to periodic performance reviews from the school system.

New Song’s first review last year revealed “significant financial challenges,” including several years of overspending, according to City Schools.

Still, New Song’s storied history led City Schools officials last December to recommend a three-year renewal of its charter under the condition that it submit to regular fiscal reviews.

That’s how Angela Alvarez, senior executive director of the district’s Office of New Initiatives, and her team discovered things were worse than they thought, Alvarez said.

“The operating organization misled us,” she said. “They were hiding information.”

System officials learned that New Song’s building is deteriorating and unsafe for students, Alvarez said. It needs a new roof, heating and air conditioning that it can’t afford to pay for, she said.

Every day, her team discovered new debt to add atop a hefty stack of unpaid telephone, utility and vendor bills, she said. Staff and health plans weren’t getting paid. Board members were leaving and unaware of the school’s problems. The roof had been leaking for years and the school wasn’t properly cleaned before the school year started, she said.

Alvarez said New Song realized it didn’t have the means to keep its school going and asked to shut it down. The district agreed.

Green, the former executive director who resigned in the fall, said he did not sign off on that choice. And he denied that he or the nonprofit held anything back from Alvarez and her staff.

“We gave them everything that they asked for,” Green said. “There wasn’t any misleading. They told us that we were in bad shape.”

Green said every time he brought financial concerns to the board, which he said went through five chairs in the same number of years, he got “crickets.” By the time he left, he was owed at least three paychecks from the nonprofit, he said.

City Schools officials declined to comment on Green’s account. Spokesperson Sherry Christian said the district “has no interest in contributing to a ‘he said, she said’ narrative.”

“Our responsibility is to the students, families and staff experiencing this change,” Christian said.

Most of the nonprofit’s listed board members could not be reached for comment. One member, Joel Bratton, declined to comment.

Derrick DeWitt Sr., a New Song board member and pastor at First Mount Calvary Baptist Church, said he wasn’t part of the decision to close New Song but thinks the board and Green share responsibility for what happened.

DeWitt, who said he last attended a meeting in July, said he and Karriem Shabazz are active members, even though “a lot of the board members have disappeared.” They’re working to appoint new board members and an interim executive director, he said.

The nonprofit’s financial woes weren’t clear to DeWitt and some other board members, he said, and they’re not involved in the school’s day-to-day operations.

If anyone misled City Schools, DeWitt said, it was Green.

The writing on the wall

Finances have been a challenge at New Song for years. And McCarter said he’s been hearing closure rumors for a year and a half.

Amelia F. Harris, a former New Song board chair and executive director until 2017, said things were tight when she joined the board in 2012.

Serving on the board a decade later, Lamar Richards also saw the writing on the wall. A 2009 graduate, Richards grew frustrated by suggestions to cut salaries while the nonprofit was still throwing Christmas parties. He said board members with no interest in the school’s financial well-being wouldn’t listen to people like him with business backgrounds.

Richards blames everyone for New Song’s end: Green, the board and City Schools. But he thinks the school district should have caught on to New Song’s decline faster.

“As someone working finance, you’re not telling me that you were hoodwinked for months and months by the financial status of this school,” Richards said. “When you knew that financial problems was going on, you should have alerted parents.”

McKenzie Allen, executive director of the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, said nonprofit charter operators submit annual audits to the district and file public tax forms, so a fiscal death spiral “never should have been a surprise at renewal.”

It would have been more responsible to deny New Song’s charter renewal and close the school in January, she said.

“New Song is an institution in Baltimore City,” Allen said. “I think the optics of the school district closing a school like that could have been really bad.”

She said keeping it open in spite of its financial state set the school up to fail.

“Now, kids and families in that neighborhood will not have that school that they felt was the perfect fit for their kids,” Allen said.

Allen’s organization has argued for years that City Schools underfunds charter schools. But it is hard to sustain a school as small as New Song in any form.

Schools are basically unsustainable when they have fewer than 300 students, Alvarez said. Schools need the same number of teachers whether there are 20 kids per class or 12, but they receive less funding if they enroll fewer students. The district has been closing its own small schools, and community members said it feels as if the only way to survive in the district is to expand.

The way forward

At recent meetings, the New Song community has continued to demand answers, even as leaders passed the buck.

“How are you all holding the operator and the board accountable?” Harris asked. “It seems like everybody that was here, conveniently, have left.”

Alvarez said the school system is considering legal action against New Song.

The school system plans to move New Song students out of their troubled building after winter break to a campus in Harlem Park, and parents are furious. They’re even more upset the system won’t provide transportation, even for kids with special needs.

In the meantime, a group of community members is trying to wrest control of New Song’s building. Even if it doesn’t revive the school, it wants to provide services such as tutoring or a Head Start program, Richards said.

“I’m not a teacher, but I do know that these years are the most important when it comes to setting up the foundation to go forward,” Richards said. “And that’s what New Song did for me and a lot of other people.”

About the Education Hub

This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.