Weeks after school’s closure, private student records remain in empty building

OKLAHOMA CITY — Confidential student records are sitting in a vacated building nearly eight weeks after a charter school permanently closed its doors, officials from the state and the school said, though both sides disagree on who is at fault. 

Proud To Partner Leadership Academy, known as PTPLA, ceased operations on July 1 after the Statewide Charter School Board canceled its charter contract over financial, operational and academic quality concerns. 

The charter high school’s 100 students have either graduated or transferred elsewhere, but paper copies of their academic transcripts, vaccination records and enrollment documents still remain at PTPLA’s former building in southwest Oklahoma City, raising concerns over privacy protections and potentially racking up thousands of dollars in rental fees, according to email correspondence Oklahoma Voice obtained from the state.

Representatives of the shuttered school told Oklahoma Voice that state employees haven’t worked with the building’s landlord to pick up the records.

A spokesperson for the Statewide Charter School Board, Shelly Hickman, said board staff has contacted the landlord, who indicated the student records are under lock and key and “it is the PTPLA team, and not he, who has that key.”

The state received electronic copies of the student records and has been providing them daily to school families upon request, Hickman said. A lack of paper copies hasn’t stopped any students from attending school elsewhere, she said, because enrollment commonly involves an electronic exchange of records.

Recovering the physical copies from the empty school building, though, has turned into a monthslong dispute.

The state board’s staff tried to retrieve the files multiple times in June when the school still occupied the building, but PTPLA leadership declined to provide them because the records were incomplete, Hickman said. 

Emails that Oklahoma Voice obtained show state officials have asked PTPLA representatives repeatedly in July and August to either hand over the physical documents or agree to a time that state employees could pick up the records.

School representatives on a “transition team” overseeing the closure had a deadline of Aug. 12 to transfer all financial, student and personnel records, the emails show. Days after the deadline, state employees still were sending emails seeking a response.

“We could be at the building today if the PTPLA transition team arranged for us to enter and finally produced these hard copy records for us, which has been their legal responsibility all along,” Hickman said.

The state needs to contact the building’s landlord to gain entry because the school no longer has access to the facility, said Marva Williamson, a PTPLA board member and the school’s only remaining representative on the transition team. 

School board member Charlesetta Jossell also was part of the team but resigned on Aug. 18, email records show.

The school board president of PTPLA, Sharri Coleman, returned the building’s keys to the landlord on July 31, according to a written memorandum, which Oklahoma Voice obtained. 

The memorandum states that student records and some desks still remained inside at the time of the key transfer. Any further access to the building must be coordinated with the landlord, the document states.

Coleman said she isn’t part of the transition team. Her responsibility was to ensure the building was secure and the keys were returned, not to transfer records, she said.

But, she said she became concerned with the lack of progress toward final closure, so she decided to notify the news media, multiple state lawmakers and state Superintendent Lindel Fields on Friday of the documents remaining in the former school facility.

“The reason why I went to state officials is so that someone on the outside can say, ‘Hey, get the records. The records have been left there for you. They weren’t abandoned. There was documentation saying that they’re in the building,’” Coleman told Oklahoma Voice on Monday. “That’s just a part of the transition process, and I just felt like the transition process had stalled.”

Her email to state leaders only stoked frustrations among the statewide board and its staff.

State employees have made “numerous attempts” to obtain the documents from PTPLA, Statewide Charter School Board Chair Brian Shellem wrote in an email to Coleman on Sunday evening.

Abandoning the documents could violate student privacy laws, he wrote. His email argues that the school at any point could have hired a courier service to deliver the records to the statewide board’s offices.

Meanwhile, the leftover items have accrued two months of rental fees, totaling $39,469, according to an email Thursday from the building landlord, Cameron Kaspereit.

Kaspereit, who did not return requests for comment from Oklahoma Voice, wrote in emails to state officials last week that another $118,800 is owed for a “building expense due from the early termination,” along with “fees for damages previously submitted.”

The last of PTPLA’s funds will go toward its outstanding bills, according to a July 21 email from the state board’s legal compliance officer, Emily Witwer.

“Following closure, the landlord’s only recourse would be to sue the defunct entity, as the Statewide Charter School Board does not inherit the debts of PTPLA,” she wrote.