St. Hope charter schools agreement up for a Thursday vote. What’s at stake
St. Hope Public Schools and its charter authorizer, Sacramento City Unified School District, have been on rocky terms for more than a year.
The question district trustees face Thursday night surrounds whether a draft agreement between the district and the charter school is robust enough to ensure the charter school responsibly operates for the next five years of its charter. Whether St. Hope leaders have demonstrated the accountability and partnership necessary over the past year will also play into their decision.
In the past six months, the charter school has been subject to a formal corrective action plan issued by the district at the same time that leaders of both agencies negotiated the terms of a memorandum of understanding that will place further conditions for the charter to meet. The SCUSD board will vote on a final version of the MOU, which has already been passed by St. Hope’s board, at the Thursday meeting.
Despite “meaningful movement in compliance and transparency,” district staff said they are concerned that “meaningful change will only occur if SHPS conducts a serious root-cause analysis and is open to rethinking historic practices or assumptions.”
High teacher turnover and low teacher credential rates
High turnover is one of many of the school district’s concerns that remain more than a year after the charter school was issued a notice to correct.
St. Hope teachers, the vast majority of whom were hired in 2025, still allege they face poor and often unsafe conditions . As a result, turnover is extreme — St. Hope lost 70% of its teaching staff between November 2024 and today.
Of the 54 teachers employed at St. Hope schools in November 2024, only 16 remain in their roles one year later (another three came back as administrators). An additional five hired in 2025 were gone before Thanksgiving break.
St. Hope leaders are presenting a much more optimistic number — that 85% of its teaching staff employed at the end of the year who were eligible to return (those whose contracts were renewed and had a credentialing agreement with the school) came back to their jobs in the fall. The district has taken issue with this narrative, saying that the documented turnover was “extremely high.”
Veteran St. Hope teachers, who are resisting the influence of the teachers union at the school, say that those who have quit weren’t cut out for the inherently difficult, but ultimately rewarding job of teaching a large population of at-risk youth. Others, including one who quit after one month into the school year, said that working at St. Hope schools was dangerous.
The district is also still troubled by the lack of teachers with preliminary or clear credentials, which district charter administrator Amanda Goldman previously said was “objectively low.”
According to district calculations, only 44% of St. Hope teachers held a preliminary or clear credential as of October. The charter school presented items to the district that “appeared to reflect efforts to negotiate salary increases, compensation for credential programs, and other measures that would strongly impact retention of high-quality teachers,” but district staff noted that items presented to St. Hope’s labor partners (referring to the teachers union) were less promising.
Delayed investigations
Two investigations the district required St. Hope to perform by the end of the year have been delayed, the district said. One is a second investigation into allegations that football coach Kimbbie Drayton attended parties with students where drugs and alcohol were present, which the district board demanded after The Sacramento Bee’s reporting that St. Hope withheld records regarding the initial investigation from SCUSD.
The corrective action plan gave the school until the end of the year to present findings of the new investigation, but the staff report says that there was a difference in understanding of when the coach allegations report would be presented.
“District staff formally cautioned SHPS that postponements pose a risk to public trust and the appearance of delay tactics,” the report says.
St. Hope Interim Superintendent Elisha Ferguson Parson said that the report has not been delayed, but have been operating on a timeline that was presented to the district board earlier this year.
“There was mutual understanding between SCUSD and SHPS about why January made sense for this report to be delivered,” Ferguson Parsons said. “As SCUSD is aware, the investigation is being conducted by a third-party who is operating independently, and the actual finalization of the investigation depends on the investigator’s conclusion of their work. E
One teacher who reported students’ conversations about alleged parties with Drayton has yet to be interviewed for the second investigation, she confirmed to The Bee. She requested anonymity from The Bee out of concern of retaliation.
The other delayed investigation was a fiscal audit which was delayed in part because of the shutdown of the federal government, outside of St. Hope’s control. Both are anticipated to be presented in January.
Ongoing concerns about fiscal relationships
The relationship between St. Hope Public Schools and its related nonprofits, St. Hope Academy and St. Hope Development Company, is still of concern. A third-party auditor found concern with the three nonprofits fiscal interrelatedness and the latter two’s reliance on revenue from the charter schools.
Since then, some services provided by the two related nonprofits have been moved in-house and overall contract amounts have decreased. Fiscal reporting quality has also improved under a new back-office service provider that partners with St. Hope Academy as a contractor, the staff report says.
But concerns remain.
“The District identified ongoing structural risk related to the concentration of revenue flowing from SHPS to SHA and SHDC, shared executive leadership across entities, and limited independent auditability of SHA and SHDC. While SHPS has provided the documentation requested by the District, the District has no such authority over SHA or SHDC,” a SCUSD staff report reads.
How did we get here?
Although the relationship between the two parties has been tenuous for longer, tension reemerged last summer when an audit commissioned by the school district alleged a range of major violations plaguing St. Hope Public Schools, including conflicts of interest among its top officers, improper use of public funding, deficient accounting processes and the employment of a largely under-credentialed teaching staff.
Still, both St. Hope charters were renewed on promises of reform and a strong display of public support coming from the school community, with the conditions that the school adhere to a corrective action plan and enter a memorandum of understanding with the district that will define their working relationship for the next five years.
After months of delays, terms of the MOU will again be voted on at a district meeting Thursday night.
The terms of renewal stated that the charter school would enter an agreement with the district by June 30, but The Bee’s investigation into allegations against Drayton sparked increased attention about what was included in the MOU, which the board pulled from a consent agenda to demand that staff draft a stricter version. The St. Hope board rejected the terms of an updated draft, leading to months of negotiations.
This story was originally published December 18, 2025 at 11:55 AM.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to include comment from St. Hope Interim Superintendent Elisha Ferguson Parson on the investigation timeline.
