Confidential records sitting in empty charter school building are now secured, state officials say

OKLAHOMA CITY — Private records from a shuttered Oklahoma City charter school are now in state hands after months of delay and dispute.

Proud To Partner Leadership Academy, a charter high school known as PTPLA, formally closed on June 30, but for months afterward, paper copies of students’ educational records and financial documents needed for a closing audit remained in its former building in southwest Oklahoma City.

The Statewide Charter School Board canceled the school’s founding charter contract and cut off its state funding over financial, operational and academic quality concerns. Board staff then sent repeated requests that PTPLA turn over the records or allow state officials entry to retrieve them, according to email correspondence Oklahoma Voice obtained. 

Disagreements with the school turned into a legal fight with the building’s landlord. The state board on Wednesday sought an emergency court order demanding access to the records, online court documents show.

A day later, the landlord, Cameron Kaspereit, voluntarily allowed board staff to enter the property, where they picked up eight to 10 boxes of paper documents, officials said during a Statewide Charter School Board meeting Monday.

Kaspereit did not immediately return a request for comment Monday.

The landlord had until then refused to release the school documents because PTPLA owed him back rent, damages and a penalty for early lease termination, the board’s court filing states. The records were his “only leverage,” and he said he wouldn’t release them without court intervention, the board claimed in its legal filing.

Further stressing the “emergency nature” of the situation, the former school building had recently been broken into, but “according to (Kaspereit) nothing appeared to be removed,” court documents state.

State board staff are now preparing to sort through the records, said Skyler Lusnia, the state board’s director of school performance. 

“We knew it was going to be challenging, and it has been challenging,” Lusnia said of the closure process. “If and possibly when this ever happens again, we’ll be ready.”

Board staff on Monday presented a host of potential changes to administrative rules governing charter school closures. Among them is added clarity that the school, not the state, is responsible for completing closure tasks like document transfers.

The state has had electronic copies of students’ academic transcripts for several weeks, which allowed PTPLA students to transfer elsewhere unimpeded, board staff have said. 

The paper records are necessary to assemble hard-copy transcripts for students and ensure they receive proper credit for their scholastic efforts, according to the board’s court filing.

The financial records are needed to finish a legally required closing audit of PTPLA, Lusnia said. The state hired a third-party audit firm, which will be able to complete its review once the hard-copy records are in hand.

PTPLA “intentionally abandoned any attempt to comply with state and federal law regarding those documents,” the board contended in its court filing. 

Representatives of the school previously told Oklahoma Voice they no longer had access to the building after turning in the keys in July. They advised state officials to coordinate with the landlord to gain access, email records show.

PTPLA Board President Sharri Coleman alerted news media and state leaders last month that the documents had been sitting in the empty facility for weeks.

“I am pleased to hear (state board) reports that the records have been retrieved and secured,” she said Monday.