Last week, school management announced that Summit Denali will be closing its operations after the current academic year ends in June 2023. Over 677 families are stranded with their immediate academic future, and will lose their most loved school ripping apart the schools’ close-knit communities and leaving 5% of Santa Clara County’s charter school students scrambling to find new schools.
This impacts our student community including 93.8% socioeconomically disadvantaged, 86.4% Hispanic, and 63.6% students with disabilities proudly graduating school out in the cold. Summit’s approach, with its mentorship, self-directed pacing, and project-based learning, has been life-changing for many of our students.
Although Summit says that all options have been exhausted, an ad-hoc team of parents has formed to fight for the school. Parents are unable to verify the financial deficit of millions of dollars, or the claim of LCFF and SB740 financial impact clearly. Even if the deficit is true, we further observed that a couple of Lines of Credit options were available for the entire Summit group from Umpqua Bank. We are requesting you to secure bridge funding for Denali to buy us time. If we can keep the school open, we will use the next several months to identify long-term funding strategies and grant opportunities that can be used to sustain Denali's operations for the foreseeable future.
Parents are asking Summit Board:
- Transparency and collaboration to understand Denali’s financial, enrollment, and entity structure
- Corrective Action to resolve the gaps reported
- Alternatives to closure, including home office support, access to a line of credit for a special endowment fundraised for Denali with parents and community support
Please sign the petition visiting 👇🏽 if you want to help us save Summit Denali.