On January 21, Indianapolis charter school Paramount School of Excellence put the lives of children in danger by failing to notify parents of a two-hour delay at its Brookside location. Paramount, like many schools in central Indiana, delayed the start of the school day due to the brutally cold single-digit temperatures that morning.
As is the case with most charter schools, Paramount does not provide buses for students. This means many students living in the Brookside neighborhood walk to school, while others are dropped off at the school by their families. Paramount typically notifies families via texts, emails, and calls, even for minor situations—but on Tuesday, no families received any notice of the delay. As a natural consequence of this failure to communicate, parents did not realize there was a two-hour delay before sending their children off into the deadly cold.
One Paramount Brookside parent spoke anonymously about the fiasco with the Liberator.
“As we were dropping off our child, we noticed the lights were off in the school and there were no staff cars there. About 20 cars wrapped around the building. At the front of the building we saw a couple other parents huddled around about 15 students. They were the ones who told us there was a delay.”
As a result, children were left out in near-zero temperatures for hours as they waited for school administrators to open the building. This was a betrayal of those parents who either sent their children out of the door to walk to school or dropped their children off at the door, trusting that the administration would keep their children safe. Eventually, a few police cars showed up, most likely called by concerned parents who were outside of the school.
The school attempted to justify the situation stating they used a new smartphone app to let parents know about the delay. That app did not send an email, which the school normally sends to inform families of delays or cancellations. The reliance on an app fails to take into account parents who do not have smartphones or those whose primary language is not English.
Another Paramount Brookside family told the Liberator, “This was a shock to us, but also a wake up call that these charter schools do not have our children’s best interest at heart. If they drop the ball on simply notifying parents about a delay, what else is falling through the cracks?”
This incident comes fresh on the heels of the introduction of House Bill 1136 by Republicans Jake Teshka and Jeff Thompson. Should HB 1136 pass, Indianapolis Public Schools—and other school corporations—would be dissolved and replaced entirely with charter schools, such as Paramount.
Paramount Brookside has made no official acknowledgement or apology for its failure.
Featured image: A person walks on a frozen river. Credit: PickPik