Citing low academic performance, the Texas Education Agency ordered three-year-old Essence Preparatory Charter School on San Antonio’s East Side to close at the end of the school year.
School officials were notified of TEA’s decision in a Dec. 18 letter from education commissioner Mike Morath, in which he said Essence Prep was “determined to have academically unacceptable performance ratings.”
When it opened in August 2022, Essence Prep was created to close education gaps for Black and brown students in historically underserved communities.
The school currently serves around 400 students in pre-K through eighth grade.
Essence Prep received an F rating in 2022-23, a D in 2023-24 and an F in 2024-25. Following state education code, the TEA can revoke a charter’s license if a campus has gotten three failing ratings within five years.
This August marked the school’s fourth year in operation. Now, families will have to enroll elsewhere for the 2026-27 school year.
Essence Prep will not appeal TEA’s decision, school founder and superintendent Akeem Brown said on Monday. Instead, its leaders plan to finish out the school year by focusing on the students they still have.
“The process is very costly. It’s resources that we would rather use this year to focus on kids and strengthen their academics,” Brown said, adding that appeals by schools in their situation almost never work.
Parents of Essence Prep students described the TEA’s decision as “sad” and “disappointing.”
“This is a humongous loss for our community,” one father said in a string of comments from a school messaging board that Essence Prep shared with the Report.
Had Essence Prep appealed, Brown said he would have asked TEA to consider the school’s growing enrollment and the academic growth the campus saw from its first to second year of operation, when it went from a 59 to a 67, going from an F to a D rating. Both ratings are considered failing, but it’s rare for schools to move a full letter grade in one year.
Later, the school added more students and grades, which caused it to slide back to a 59 for 2024-25.
“What that meant for us was that we had to start over, because these kids that joined us were two to three grades behind, and we had to test them right away,” he said. “Because of that increase of students, their academic gains were not there like the group that we have been working with the previous year.”
But early benchmark testing showed fast progress this year, Brown added. While only four of 360 students mastered math state tests last year, 27 students were projected to master the subject this year.
Brown also estimated Essence Prep would have had nearly 1,000 students by 2028.
Serving the underserved
At Essence Prep, 99% of students are considered economically disadvantaged and more than 70% are Black. The school, which grew in enrollment each year by adding grade levels and moving into a brand-new 70,000-square-foot building in 2023, needed more than three years to repair some of the education gaps on the East Side, Essence Prep’s leaders argued in response to the TEA’s decision to shutter the school.
For Brian Dillard, a third-generation East Sider who’s chaired Essence Prep’s school board since the charter school’s inception, the TEA’s notification was disappointing but not surprising.
“You have a campus that’s already struggling to service a community that’s historically been struggling, and you put these burdens on them, instead of having levels of support there,” he said Monday.
Dillard, currently an executive at VIA Metropolitan Transit, was also instrumental in opening Essence Prep. During an interview with TEA staff years ago, he said the school would take a “holistic and student-centered approach” focused on a student’s journey of self-discovery.
Despite that, “we’ve struggled since the day we started,” Brown said.
In fact, the decision to close the school is not the first time Essence Prep has gotten bad news from the agency. In 2022, after the state board of education approved the charter 11-3, TEA ordered the Essence Prep to remove “anti-racist” quotes and languages from its website before opening its doors.
Outside regular schooling, Essence Prep offered free uniforms, free meals and after-school programming. Trying to attract more students, the school also launched new career technical education programming and a gifted and talented program.
In hindsight, Brown and Dillard admitted they would have done some things differently in the school’s three — now four — years of operation, but they don’t believe it would’ve changed the TEA’s decision to close the school.
“We’re stuck in this situation of we’re trying to correct a disservice that has been done to a community for decades,” Dillard said. “That doesn’t happen in three years.”
What happens now?
Earlier this year, Essence Prep, like any other school district with failing schools, was required to submit a turnaround plan to the state.
Brown worked on the plan for months, gathering staff and community input and submitting the plan in September, but said he never received a response from the TEA until the closure notice landed.
TEA will appoint a conservator to oversee Essence Prep’s closure after the holiday break, a cost the charter is on the hook for paying at $250 an hour.
Operating first out of community centers and churches, the school eventually moved to a new building off South East Loop 410 built specifically for Essence Prep through a $17.7 million bond awarded to the school for its “story and mission.”
Public Finance for D.A. Davidson & Co., the finance firm that underwrote the bond, will now have to decide what to do with the building, a facility several community organizations and nonprofits also have access to, Brown said.
Essence Prep is partnering with the School Discovery Network, a local school-choice organization that helps pair families with schools in the area, and hosting an open house for families Jan. 15 to help students find slots elsewhere. School officials will share more details with Essence Prep families.
The charter’s board also wants to have a “transition plan” in place for every student ahead of its last day of classes June 3.
