AURORA | Aurora Public Schools Superintendent Rico Munn urged the APS school board to hand control of Fletcher Community School over to a charter school network at a regular school board meeting April 5, citing several years of high staff turnover and sagging student performance at the beleaguered elementary school.

In a presentation to the school board, Munn pointed to consistently high teacher attrition rates, abysmal test scores and a pattern of unsuccessful restructuring efforts at the school on East 25th Avenue as support for his recommendation, which, if carried through, would be a first for APS.

For more than 15 years, repeated efforts to retool Fletcher — from splitting the school into two separate entities to applying various pilot school autonomies — have been unsuccessful, according to Munn and a recent report on the school’s performance conducted by APS’ joint steering committee on pilot schools.

“(Fletcher) has undergone two different pilot structures, it’s been a traditional school for a period of time … all of those were intended to, of course, improve achievement,” Munn said. “We have not had that intended outcome as of yet.”

Not a single third or fourth grader at Fletcher met or exceeded state standards in math on the state’s CMAS or PARCC tests last year, according to district documents. About six percent of Fletcher fifth graders met or exceeded state expectations on state English tests, which was the school’s high-water mark for performance.

Munn recommended handing the keys to Fletcher to a charter school network at either the start of next school year or at the start of the 2017-18 school year. Munn said that two charter networks, Rocky Mountain Prep and Global Village Charter Cooperative, have already expressed interest in taking over Fletcher next school year, and that the pool of charter candidates is expected to grow if the board elects to pursue Munn’s proposal but not implement it until 2017-18.

But teachers at Fletcher are less than keen on Munn’s proposal. Nearly a dozen Fletcher staffers attended the school board meeting last week and tearfully made their case for why the school should be given another chance.

“No other school that has been failing in this district — and as you are all aware there’s a lot of them — none of them have been switched over to a charter, so why us?” said Abby Cillo, who has been a third-grade teacher at Fletcher for three years. “We feel like we have been led to a promise of water and found a drought.”

Cillo and other teachers at Fletcher, which has posted an annual attrition rate of at least 21 percent for each of the past three years, said at the board meeting that they felt excluded from the decision-making process and pleaded for another chance to show improvement under the school’s current hierarchical structure. Fletcher is currently an APS pilot school, which grants the school additional procedural autonomy. Under Munn’s recommendation, Fletcher would retain pilot status until a charter model is fully implemented in about three years, at which time pilot status would be revoked. In a proposal provided separate from Munn’s, the district’s joint steering committee for pilot schools recommended that Fletcher proceed without pilot status but not be converted to a charter.

Capacity presents another issue for Fletcher as the school is currently at about 57 percent capacity and saw an enrollment decrease of nearly 100 students between this school year and 2014-15, according to APS documents. Munn said that because APS is so squeezed for space, it would neither be prudent to close Fletcher altogether, which is still technically an option, nor would it provide good optics for the district.

“I think there are just inherent challenges with closure and ultimately, we are … an at-capacity district — we don’t have room,” he said. “Taking one of our buildings out of use for education for a year just doesn’t make a whole lot of logistical sense.”

Other options still technically on the table for Fletcher include reconstitution and applying innovation status, which APS is in the process of pursuing for five other elementary, middle and high schools in northwest Aurora.

School board member Dan Jorgensen said that he understands the concerns of Fletcher teachers, but that the district does not want to see the school turn into another Aurora Central High School, which has watched four years of the state’s accountability clock tick by without much improvement.

“It’s a tough decision, it’s not one that any of us take lightly and it’s an unfortunate confluence of events,” Jorgensen said. “But from where we stand, we’re dealing with Central at the end of the (accountability) clock, (and) we don’t want other Centrals. We don’t want other schools to languish.”

Board member Cathy Wildman, however, received Munn’s proposal with more hesitation.

“I just don’t want to hand the building over, etc., to somebody to come in here and stay for a few years and then opt out,” she said. “I don’t think that’s good community relations.”

The Aurora School Board took no formal action on Munn’s charter conversion recommendation last week.