St. Hope rejects Sacramento City Unified’s terms of renewal agreement. What’s next?
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St. Hope Public Schools is rejecting the terms of an agreement that its charter authorizer put forward last week. The two main sticking points surround its fiscal relationship with its related nonprofit and its contract with a controversial attorney.
In September, the school’s charter was renewed under the condition that it enter into a memorandum of understanding with Sacramento City Unified School District by June 30 of this year that outlined specific accountability measures to address concerns about the school’s various governance, operational and fiscal issues.
Charter schools are not required to have memorandums of understanding with their charter authorizer, but the terms of St. Hope’s renewal explicitly required that they enter into one before the charter renews on July 1.
Now that the deadline has passed, leaders are figuring out what this means for the relationship between St. Hope and the district.
Sacramento district seeks accountability from St. Hope
Three weeks after directing their staff to make the terms of its agreement with St. Hope more robust, the Sacramento City Unified board discussed at its meeting Thursday night the final version of the MOU it would send back to the charter to sign.
In a public comment SCTA President Nikki Milevsky brought attention to the state audit which showed that Highlands Community Charter and Technical School received more than $180 million in inappropriate state funds due to lax oversight by state and local educational agencies. She noted that Highlands Charter authorizers Sacramento County Office of Education and Twin Rivers Unified School Districts relied on their staff and legal counsel to guide them in decision making related to the school.
“We think we have the same problem here,” Milevsky said about the district’s oversight of its charters.
Also during the public comment period, interim St. Hope leaders Elisha Ferguson Parsons and Jim Scheible addressed the board, emphasizing their desire to partner with the district, but cautioned the district to not overreach in its oversight of the charter.
The night before the district board meeting, the St. Hope board sent an email to the Sacramento City Unified board saying that they found certain aspects of the agreement unacceptable, and that they would not sign an MOU if it contained restrictions on St. Hope’s choice in contractors it may use for back office services, administrative staff or legal counsel.
Around 40 Sac High and Public School 7 parents, staff members and students showed up to Thursday night’s meeting to show support for St. Hope, advocating for the school’s existence and independence from what some called district overreach.
“We can’t wave a magic wand and expect everything that has been done to be undone, but yet we do everything that we can as teachers to try to help inspire, challenge and empower these students,” math teacher Samuel Bellow said. “If there is no St. Hope Public Schools, if there is no PS7, then many of these students will fall to the wayside.”
But the St. Hope board’s letter and the words in support of St. Hope’s independence did not sway the board toward a more lax position. All board members favored the longer term, stricter version of the document, with several noting that they were not in a place to trust that the school would make progress absent of closer oversight.
In May, a Sacramento Bee investigation found that St. Hope leadership misled the district about an investigation into teacher allegations that a coach was partying with his students. When the district asked for complaints made about the coach through a California Public Records Act request, St. Hope only turned over two emails when there were at least six made by three different teachers. Several board members have voiced major concern over the findings of the story, and they are requiring that another investigation into the matter take place by January 2026.
“With St. Hope, we are not in a trusted, verified place at the moment — we are currently in a verify and enforce place,” Trustee Taylor Kayatta said. “This MOU, therefore, should reflect the conditions the previous board established as prerequisites for charter renewal. It should also apply for the full charter term, and it should include the strongest enforceable language that we can get.”
Trustee Tara Jeane echoed Kayatta’s sentiment in her comments. Among concerns about teacher turnover, the school’s fiduciary relationship with its related nonprofits and the investigation into coach Kimbbie Drayton, Jeane was frustrated with the fact that St. Hope put Cassandra Jennings, who they had previously asked to step down from the board for concerns about conflicts of interest, in an interim position of leadership following St. Hope Superintendent Lisa Ruda’s death in May.
“I’m sitting here going, ‘I want to partner, I want to collaborate,’ but I’m not in a place where I have a ton of trust and I need an MOU that makes it very clear,” she said. “So I know as a board what my job is, and that we are not overstepping or overreaching, because that is not my job. But these are public monies that have been given to these folks to provide public education to kids, and they deserve it, and it’s our job to make sure that’s happening.”
The board ultimately voted to adopt the stricter MOU that would require the school to drop its contract for back-office services with related nonprofit St. Hope Academy and to abandon its relationship with lawyer Kevin Hiestand, who led the St. Hope investigation into Drayton. Hiestand currently serves on the board of the St. Hope Endowment and previously held dual roles as school founder Kevin Johnson’s personal lawyer and the school’s Title IX officer. After a 17-year-old Sacramento High student reported in 2008 that Johnson, interim principal at the time, inappropriately touched her, a Sacramento Bee investigation found that Hiestand questioned the student before the authorities were notified.
At Kayatta’s suggestion, the requirement that Jennings be removed from serving any sort of leadership position was replaced with language that precludes a nonemployee from approving the expenditure of any funds or contracts on behalf of the school.
St. Hope board says no to MOU
In a meeting Monday morning, the St. Hope Executive Committee moved to adopt their own version of the MOU and to send a statement to the Sacramento City Unified board about the outstanding issues it has with the one approved Thursday night.
St. Hope made it clear in the letter that it is not backing down on its relationship with Hiestand nor its contract for back-office services with St. Hope Academy, which amounts to around $350,000. Leaders said that it cannot accept the district’s attempt to “retroactively control” which contractors St. Hope may use for back-office services.
The board has already awarded a contract to St. Hope Academy following a Request for Proposal process.
“In addition to not being able to accept MOU provisions that overreach into operational decisions, the SHPS Board also cannot agree to a term in the MOU that would cause SHPS to be immediately in violation of said MOU at the time of execution, nor can it accept conditions that would potentially disrupt payroll for employees,” the letter reads.
SCUSD spokesperson Alexander Goldberg said that this statement has been forwarded to the board and that they are gathering information for next steps. The next district board meeting is in August.
Scheible made it clear that despite the lack of an agreement between the two entities, St. Hope has been and will continue to work on aspects of its corrective action plan, including attracting and retaining credentialed teachers, ensuring its financial reporting is compliant and revising its Local Control and Accountability Plan to reflect how funds going to third party contractors are aligned with student outcomes.
This story was originally published July 1, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
