1620 News Radio’s Andrew McKay interviewed Superintendent Malcolm Thomas this morning about his recommendation to terminate the charter contracts for the three schools run by Newpoint Education Partners – Five Flags Academy at Newpoint, Newpoint Academy and Newpoint Pensacola.
Thomas blamed his staff for not letting the Escambia County School Board know that schools were under a monitoring plan. “We should have brought the school board in when we decided to bring in the monitoring plan, and we’ve corrected that,” said the superintendent. “We’ve sent a memo to staff at this point to let them know that if we create a monitoring plan for a contract that they should copy my office and we’ll copy the school board. That should have happened. That didn’t happen.”
He fails to mention that he had the opportunity to bring up the monitoring plans when the Newpoint principal made his presentations to the school board – the last presentation was in March.
What about last May? Thomas said he turned it over to his staff when he got the phone call from the whistleblower.
He said, “As soon as we heard that, we turned it over to staff. Staff then begins to try to gather information. We begin to work with the charter school. There have been meetings. You’ll see in the back up that’s posted on the school board website. You’ll see meetings that are outlined to the charter school administration and the corporate administration from Newpoint. You’ll see meetings that are discussing these issues, trying to get them to work through it, trying to get the school to step up and solve issues.”
The meetings to which Thomas is referring started in November – six months after the May 2014 phone call and the delivery of the packet from Rev. Sutek.
Here is the link to the entire interview. Good job, Andrew.