Riverhead Charter School parents, teachers speak out

In the week since charges brought by New York State United Teachers against Riverhead Charter School were disclosed by RiverheadLOCAL, see story, parents of students and former students, as well as current and former teachers and staff members have come forward in a chorus of complaints about the school’s administration and board of trustees.

Collectively, their complaints paint a picture of a school run by a forceful principal with a “my-way-or-the-highway” leadership style, a man they characterize as both controlling and vindictive and who bristles at “interference” by parents and school board members in the affairs of his school.

Riverhead Charter School principal Raymond Ankrum, who declined comment for the March 27 article, did not respond to subsequent phone messages or email requests for interviews. School board president Zenobia Hartfield also did not respond to requests for comments.  

The board of trustees held a special meeting last night to discuss, according to the meeting agenda, the “RiverheadLOCAL article” and two inquiries the board has received since its publication from the N.Y. State Education Department Charter School Office, but the board did not hold the discussion in open session. Instead, after discussing the content of a proposed parent survey, voting on an appointment to fill a board vacancy, and talking about how to respond to one of the NYSED inquiries — concerning the procedure used to appoint board members — Hartfield closed the meeting for an executive session to discuss “employee issues.”

Parents who attended the meeting — which Hartfield said “the public is free to observe” but not allowed to comment — said afterward they had hoped to get some answers from the board to the allegations contained in the unfair practice charges filed with the state Public Employees Relations Board. They left disappointed.

Revelations about the PERB charges prompted more than a dozen parents to contact RiverheadLOCAL by phone and email. All but two would only speak on the condition of anonymity — for fear of retaliation, they said.

Lisa Denmeade, whose fifth-grader has been at the charter school since kindergarten said she is “disgusted, angry and appalled” by the situation at the school.

“Since Mr. Ankrum took over, the morale of the teachers has completely gone downhill,” Denmeade said. “It’s not the warm, family atmosphere that RCS used to have. The tension there is so thick you can cut it with a knife.”

“You can tell the teachers are scared and not happy. You can tell they are torn, worried about being retaliated against,” Denmeade said.

Her daughter’s classroom teacher, Jackie Scoglio-Walsh, was fired in December and her social studies teacher, Brandon Lloyd, was fired in March. The “teacher disappearances” have been traumatizing to her daughter and other students, Denmeade said.

Scoglio-Walsh was fired just before the holiday break on Dec. 20. The school sent home a note on Jan. 6, informing parents of her termination without explanation.

The loss of both teachers had her daughter coming home from school crying. And it came on top of another painful loss last year, when school social worker Lacey Branker was fired — with no notice and no explanation. To make matters worse, the social worker was fired during state testing, she said. Her family was going through a tough time and her daughter saw Branker frequently, Dunmeade said.

Some time after the social worker’s termination, Ankrum pulled her daughter out of class “to grill and interrogate her” about whether Branker was visiting the family’s home.

“We were outraged,” Dunmeade said. “My husband and I met with him to ask why and tell him he was way out of line. If he had questions about visitors to our home, he should have asked us, not our daughter.” She said Ankrum told them “he had the legal right” to question the child.

“He acted like we were wrong,” she said. “He didn’t seem like he was even listening.”

She complained to the board at a meeting but they didn’t respond, she said.

Reading Monday’s report involving kindergarten teacher Donna Ruddy, “put me over the edge,” Denmeade said. “I know this woman loves her job, loves those children as her own and is one of the most beloved teachers there,” she said. “I had to speak out.”

Cheryl Inguanta, who pulled her children out of RCS at the end of the last school year, said she and the principal butted heads over how the school did — or did not, she contends — adhere to its charter.

Ankrum did not want to have a parents association at the school, she said. There was no safety program in place, no lockdown procedures, said Inguanta, a security guard with the Eastport-South Manor school district.

Inguanta said she complained at board meetings and send the board emails of complaint, “but they never responded.”

When she asked to see the school’s charter, she was asked why and what she wanted to see and was told she had to submit a FOIL request to be able to look at it, she said.

“When they granted the request, I was told I was only allowed 30 minutes to read the charter and I had Michelle Dalpiaz [the school’s director of operations and finance] sitting there watching me read it the whole time,” Inguanta said.

She said she decided to remove her children from RCS after Ankrum told her, when she asked for extra reading help for one child, that her kids would never get any extra help at the school because of the difficulties between her and the principal.

“That made up my mind,” Inguanta said.

“The whole environment is draped in fear,” said special needs teacher’s aide Louise Wilkinson. Wilkinson was placed at the charter school by the Riverhead Central School in 2010; she resigned in November 2012, after working under Ankrum as principal for a few months.

“Any person holding any position there is in danger of being eliminated if they voice an opinion that is not in line with the administration,” Wilkinson said.

Branker, the social worker who started at RCS in 2007 and was fired on April 15, 2013, said the principal gave her an ultimatum: do what I want or move on, she said.

“He told me to take the next day off to think about what I wanted to do. The next day was Friday. When she returned to work the following Monday, she said, “Ankrum told me if I resigned at the end of the school year, he’d allow me to collect unemployment.” She said she would not agree to resign. “‘Then today’s your last day,'” he said.

In the five or six weeks before a replacement was hired, “children mandated to receive services didn’t receive them.”

Another ex-teacher, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, “It’s common practice at the school that there’s noncompliance with special education regulations. Co-teachers in inclusion classrooms required to have two teachers are “routinely” pulled out to substitute in general education classrooms when a teacher was absent, according to the former teacher. That left just one teacher in the inclusion classroom.

But speaking out, even internally, can mean your job, the teacher said.

Branker said her outspokenness was what ultimately led to her termination. The board held a staff retreat facilitated by an outside education consultant in December 2012. Its purpose was for staff to air their feelings and concerns about the school and administration, according to Branker. After the facilitator had board and administration members leave the room for a while to allow staff to speak openly, the meeting “turned into a venting session about Ray,” Branker said.

The principal, angered that he was asked to leave the room, never returned to the meeting, held on a Saturday at Riverhead library, Branker said. He called teachers at home that evening to find out what was said, according to both Branker and former Spanish teacher Silvia Tenreiro, who resigned at the end of the last school year.

Branker, who was also a member of the union’s executive board, said she was the most outspoken person at the retreat, “discussing the concerns I had… his bullying tactics, his pitting people against each other, all the fear there. Someone must have went back and reported it back to him,” she said.

The following Monday, Ankrum called a staff meeting to tell people if they had something to say they should say it to his face, Branker and Tenreiro said.

He called Branker into a private meeting immediately afterwards to deliver the same message to her individually. “He told me I had no right to speak like that. He said, ‘Who do you think you are?’ After that, everything went downhill.”

She was fired in April.

Ankrum told the News-Review this week that any firings or non-renewals of contracts since he became principal in July 2012 were done with the students in mind. The firings that are the subject of the PERB complaints were for “just cause,” he told the newspaper.