“It just helps to personalize education,” he said. “Being in such a small setting, you really get to see these students as people and connect with them that way. That’s just how I like to be as an educator, but I think students really respond to it that their teachers and educators and staff members and admin — everyone knows them as people first.”
It’s especially devastating, Williams said, for teachers and students who transferred into El Primero High School from Alum Rock High this year.
“We were able to absorb some of the teachers and some of the students and for them to have to go through this again… I teach juniors and seniors, so I have some students who have lost two schools in the span of their high school career,” he said.
The schools struggled financially since at least the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortly after employees unionized in 2020 — a rare feat for charter staff — they began to raise concerns about some of DCP’s funding.
As members began trying to track DCP’s finances, Williams said they started to think more and more that, “It doesn’t seem like we’re operating in the green.”
“It kind of came to a head last year … that the organization had a huge fiscal deficit,” he told KQED.
Last March, the union passed a vote of no confidence in Pete Settelmeyer, the CEO at the time, citing fiscal mismanagement and the abrupt Alum Rock High closure. Settelmeyer resigned months later.
In addition to dwindling enrollment-based funding, DCP has struggled to make up for its reliance on one-time COVID-19 relief funding and the $30 million it owes on bonds used for major construction the school began in 2015.
