In an emotional Friday night meeting, the board of JJ Legacy School voted to close the elementary school. Its last day of classes will be Friday, January 12.
The sudden, emergency move followed a dire presentation on the charter school’s finances from Erin Anderson, the director of charter-school authorizing at Osprey Wilds Environmental Learning Center. Authorizers are nonprofits or universities with the responsibility to monitor charter schools for their academic, financial, operational, and student performance.
“It’s not just that it’s not a pretty financial picture,” Anderson said. “It’s that I don’t see a path for this school to continue.”
The decision to close JJ Legacy, formally known as Legacy of Dr. Josie R. Johnson Montessori School, comes just months after a rental dispute and eviction at a previous location, Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church. At that site, school leaders said that the landlord had failed to address many maintenance issues that left several classrooms and bathrooms unusable. The church countered that some of the maintenance issues were the school’s responsibility.
JJ Legacy moved into its new location, in north Minneapolis’ Family Baptist Church, at the end of August, and looked forward to a new chapter in a better-maintained building.
But on Friday night, that chapter came to an abrupt close. Families had been notified about the meeting Thursday afternoon; even school board members said they had no inkling of the scope of the problem until 36 hours earlier.
In the school gymnasium, Anderson explained to a crowd of about 60 parents, children, and staff that charter schools receive money from the state based on the number of students enrolled. But she recently discovered that JJ Legacy had reported a highly inaccurate number of students to the Minnesota Department of Education.
The school currently enrolls 57 students, from pre-K through grade six. But the Minnesota Department of Education had been paying the school for 183 students—more than three times the number of students that actually attend the school. That meant that by the end of December, the school had received—and spent—more than its budget for the whole school year.
To make up for the overpayments, she said, the Minnesota Department of Education would stop providing state funding to the school through at least the rest of the 2023–24 school year. As a result, on January 15, when the school would typically receive a state payment, there would be no money. Teachers wouldn’t get paid. Transportation costs wouldn’t get paid. Insurance wouldn’t get paid.
“We’re at a spot where despite all the work that everybody in this room has done for the last years, there is no more money,” Anderson said.
To make matters worse, she said, the school holds no fiscal reserves and is more than $700,000 in debt. The Minnesota Department of Education recently informed JJ Legacy that it was in statutory operating debt. Statutory operating debt would ordinarily require additional oversight by the state. But, as the school community found out Friday, JJ Legacy faced a more immediate cliff.
Anderson recommended that the school close before the state cut off funding on January 15.
More than 70 percent of JJ Legacy’s students last year were Black. Parents have described it as a space where Black educators can create their own affirming learning environment, and where Black children can thrive without being undermined by racism. Over the summer, the uncertainty about finding a new location for the school weighed heavily on families, who joined a Children’s March in July to protest the eviction.
After the school moved, enrollment dropped by nearly half. But the families who returned for an open house in September were excited to reunite with their school community and help decorate a new building for their children.
Now, given the suddenness of the school’s closure, those children do not know where they will be attending school after Martin Luther King Day. Their teachers will be out of work, too.
Financial meltdown surprises parents, teachers, staff
Parents and staff reacted to the news with grief and shock.
“How can something like this happen at this magnitude?” asked Chloe Floyd, a student-success coach at the school. “How did this happen for such a long period of time without being noticed?”
Barb Marchetti, the school’s director of exceptional scholars—JJ Legacy’s term for special education—pointed to accounting issues.
Like many Minnesota charter schools, JJ Legacy previously contracted with The Anton Group, a St. Paul–based accounting firm. In 2022, the once-popular firm provided services to one in five Minnesota charter schools.
But that firm dissolved in August 2022, after one of its accountants, Michael Pocrnich, was accused of stealing from a different charter school. His colleagues reported him to police, and none of the firm’s other accountants were accused of wrongdoing in the case. Pocrnich has since been criminally charged with theft by swindle.
Some of the partners of The Anton Group reconstituted a new accounting firm, EdFinMN, which took on many of The Anton Group’s previous clients. JJ Legacy decided to work with another accountant who’d formerly worked at The Anton Group, but that accountant left JJ Legacy after a brief spell. The school then operated with no accountant for much of the 2022–2023 school year. The school also performed no audit for the past two years.
When the school finally hired a new accountant in August, it took several months to get the previous year’s records in order. According to Anderson, this is when the school began to discover the extent of its financial hole.
“We were working with the best information we had, which was not very good,” Anderson said.
The past two years also have represented a difficult spell for JJ Legacy’s leadership. Tonicia Abdur Salaam, the head of school and co-founder, has been caring for her husband, the school’s other co-founder, through a terminal illness. And as the school struggled against eviction throughout 2023, its board, charged with overseeing the school, dwindled to just one member.
Four new board members were seated in December. The meeting they convened to close the school represented only their second school-board meeting.
At the Friday-night gathering, parents and staff tried to find a way out. What if they raised enough money, they suggested?
That would prove impossible, “unless you know a billionaire who will hand over a million dollars,” Anderson said—quickly clarifying they would actually need $1.5 million.
“Is there a deadline for that?” someone asked.
“Now,” Anderson said. “Next Friday.”
She acknowledged the feelings of school community members.
“It’s sudden and it’s terrible,” she said. “What will feel worse is if MDE cuts you off without warning. At least this way you have some control of the situation. You can breathe all together, say your goodbyes, be sad together. This way you have some control over what that goodbye looks like.”
Parents have one week to enroll their kids in a new school
JJ Legacy staff had invited leaders from Excell Academy, a Brooklyn Park charter school, to attend the emergency meeting. They recommended that students looking for a similar, affirming environment would find a home there. JJ Legacy also provided a handout listing other charter and district schools for families to consider.
As the school’s financial reality started to sink in, the mood in the school gymnasium felt more like a wake than a school board meeting. Parents and staff, often through tears, started sharing their fondness and gratitude for the time they’d spent at JJ Legacy.
“It feels like the school has been dealt such a bad hand,” said Benny Roberts, whose third-grade daughter attends the school. Roberts is also the brother of Tonicia Abdur Salaam. Roberts said that typically when a school closes, it’s because the head of school did something wrong, but he stressed that hadn’t occurred here. (Abdur Salaam, who is on family leave caring for her husband, did not attend the meeting or respond to interview requests Friday.)
Despite his sadness, Roberts said, he felt appreciative. “I know my daughter can take this with her anywhere, because of the way she’s been affirmed. But it just sucks as a parent, because there’s nothing we can do.”
Daeona Griffin, one of the new school-board members, said her nine-year-old son had thrived at JJ Legacy. He experiences social anxiety and used to have a hard time getting out of the house in the morning for school. But at JJ Legacy, he made his first friend. She was not sure where her family would go next; they do not live near Excell Academy.
Bisola Wald, a staff member and parent at the school, said the school’s dissolution pointed to a structural lack of state support for charter schools. With such a precarious structure, she said, “all it takes is one harmful act to undermine that,” she said.
When people had finished sharing their sentiments, the new school-board members, still unsure in their role, recognized it was time to formalize the decision to close. Toni Newborn, one of the new school board members, introduced a motion to shutter JJ Legacy. All board members present voted in favor.
“Now comes the hard part,” said a parent in the audience. “We gotta tell the kids.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to better reflect the school’s relationship with its former accountants.
