The board of trustees of Commonwealth Charter Academy called a hastily organized special meeting on Nov. 3, 2021 to discuss whether the school should fire the leader of its academic program, Adam Fraser.
The board’s decision about whether to fire Fraser four years ago wasn’t just a personnel decision — it is one of the only times the board has had to listen to concerns that the school’s growth was undermining its mission.
CCA, as the school is typically referred to, is the fastest growing school that Pa. has ever seen, adding more than 25,000 students in the past five years — more than tripling its size. This growth has happened with little public discussion about whether the school can handle this many students.
CCA’s leaders often say the school’s growth is proof it’s capable of handling even more growth, otherwise parents would enroll their kids elsewhere.
More than 130 people signed onto the Zoom to Fraser’s hearing and another 20 showed up in-person. CCA typically has only one or two visitors at its board meetings.
After 13 years of service, Fraser was one of the longest serving employees at CCA and had risen to become the Provost, the highest ranking academic officer in the school. If the school’s academics were suffering with the weight of more than 10,000 new students, Fraser was one of the people in the best position to sound the alarm.
According to staff and parents who spoke to PennLive, that’s what Fraser was doing. And they wanted to save the job of the man who they believed was standing up for families like them.
“This man has been an absolute godsend to my family,” said Sarah Rodriguez, one of around 15 parents, caretakers and staff who spoke up in support of Fraser that day.
“Who calls you in the middle of his vacation in the summer telling you I’m taking a break from building my deck so that I can help you when school starts?” another parent testified to the board
“We’re just a CCA family with one of the nearly 20,000 students who attend CCA,” a third parent said. “Yet Mr. Fraser knows who we are because he’s taken the time to get to know us.”
The school’s leadership had accused Fraser of insubordination, trying to create a subculture within the school that undermined their leadership. A week before the board meeting the CEO, Tom Longenecker, had brought Fraser into his office and asked him about a text message he sent to other senior staff but not Longenecker.
Within a couple days the school took Fraser’s computer, launched an investigation and recommended his termination. Officially, CCA had accused Fraser of taking “actions detrimental to the mission and effective operation of Commonwealth Charter Academy.”
Fraser believes the school may have found messages and emails on his computer where he raised critical questions to board members and staff about how the school’s academic performance was suffering.
“When we grew so quickly during COVID we got away from doing some of the things that we routinely have done really well because so many new teachers were brought on staff,” Fraser explained during an interview by a CCA parent soon after the board meeting was over. “We were talking through how to get us back to that level of excellence.”
For an hour, the board listened to parents speak on Fraser’s behalf. “I don’t know who he offended or why you feel that his termination is needed, but Adam Fraser is CCA,” Rodriguez said. “My children love him. Don’t you love him?”
Then the board went into executive session to decide whether the most prominent voice calling for a renewed focus on academic quality still had a place at CCA.
NOT THE ONLY ONE
Fraser’s concerns about the speed of CCA’s growth were relatively unique in that he held such a senior leadership position. But Fraser is not alone in his concerns.
CCA’s leadership says the school is adding staff to serve more students, a modular approach to education where each group of new students and teachers fits as seamlessly into their school as the last, with equally impressive results.
“We’re proud to be the most sought-after and fastest-growing public school entity in Pennsylvania, because that growth reflects the trust families and teachers have placed in us,” said Tim Eller, a spokesperson for CCA.
But a number of CCA staff said growing so fast forced the school into difficult and challenging periods of change. They say its priorities and identity shifted as a result. As the head of the school’s academic program, Fraser said he was in charge of hiring around 1,000 new employees in less than two years — a hiring spree unlike anything any school in Pa. had ever seen. And as a result, the school no longer had the bandwidth to give sufficient attention to how these teachers were performing, Fraser said.
“I’m literally hiring people till 11 p.m, at night, reorganizing departments every three months because they’ve outgrown their last org chart,” Fraser said. But CCA’s top leaders were, “just like, ‘What’s going on? How’s your day going?’ They had no clue.”
PennLive spoke to more than 20 other employees at CCA across many of the school’s departments and academic programs, many of whom had stories similar to Fraser. Some left the school in part because they were concerned the school’s focus on enrollment growth came at the expense of the students.
Some said CCA began attracting a greater proportion of students who were insufficiently prepared to succeed in a cyber environment. They said CCA had come to feel more like a business focused on convincing parents to enroll new students and keep them there, rather than an academic institution focused on the students’ academic performance.
A special education teacher who worked at CCA for seven years, said teachers were exhausted trying to keep up. “They wanted to grow the school. Okay, cool, grow the school. But they lost the focus and it was no longer about the students and their families and the education we were providing,” she said.
Although a majority of the CCA staff who spoke to PennLive shared a similar view, a handful said they thought the school was successfully adapting to address new challenges.
CCA’s leaders didn’t respond to questions about which challenges were serious or ongoing and which concerns it believed were overblown or no longer a problem. Instead, they called into question the motivations of its former employees.
“It’s not unusual for former employees to speak negatively about a previous employer,” said Eller, CCA’s spokesperson. “Isolated comments from a handful of current or former staff members do not reflect the actual experience of the thousands of families, teachers, administrators, and support personnel who are proud to be part of the CCA community.
“Statements taken out of context, and remarks from undisclosed or clearly disgruntled individuals, don’t match the overwhelmingly positive feedback we receive from our families and staff,” Eller said.
Some CCA staff were willing to use their names. But many of them still work in cyber schools or public education and worried CCA would make it more difficult for them to get a job reference. A few said they didn’t want Pa. lawmakers to misinterpret their critiques of CCA as a broader critique of cyber school in general.
An additional five former CCA employees told PennLive they had concerns about CCA’s direction but were too afraid to speak about them in detail, even anonymously. Two of them said they were pressured into signing noncompete agreements and were worried CCA might try to take legal action against them if they spoke about their time at the school.
“They have big money and are extremely aggressive,” one former staff member said. “I need to safeguard myself, my assets, and family and friends for my protection. Sorry if that sounds overly paranoid.”
During the Fraser hearing, parents said staff told them they were afraid to show up to the Zoom meeting, let alone testify. One employee who worked in a CCA technology department at the time said two CCA administrators asked him to track the names of staff who logged into the video call during the special board meeting. CCA didn’t respond to a question on why.
In a letter to a CCA parent after the 2021 board meeting, Dyer, CCA’s board president at the time, said employees who disagreed with the school’s treatment of Fraser were free to leave.
“May I respectfully suggest that, perhaps, those limited number of staff members who are genuinely disaffected would be happier seeking employment elsewhere,” Dyer wrote.
'WHETHER IT WAS THE BEST PLACE FOR YOUR KID OR NOT'
A staff member who worked in enrollment at CCA for more than five years, both before and during the rapid growth, said once the pandemic hit, the school’s leaders focused on signing up as many students as possible. “There was just such a push about just getting people in the door. Get them signed up,” she said.
In a statement to PennLive, Eller said CCA does not prioritize enrollment numbers. “CCA does not have, nor has it ever had, enrollment goals. CCA’s focus has always been on providing students and families with a high-quality public education that meets their individual needs,” Eller said.
CCA teachers are often asked to attend recruiting events in the community as part of their jobs. Lora Bueno retired from the school in 2023 after teaching there for 16 years. Bueno said the tone of these recruiting events changed over the course of her tenure. CCA used to emphasize the challenges students would face in a cyber school environment.
“And if you don’t think your child can do that, then this might not be the best place for you,” Bueno said the school would tell parents.
But those presentations changed toward the end of her time at CCA. ”It was just blowing smoke. It was, ‘This is the best place for your kid.’ Whether it was the best place for the kid or not. It was like, ‘Our school is the greatest and everybody should go here and bring your kid here and it doesn’t matter what the reason why your kid wants or needs cyber school.”
In part, as a result, the types of students at CCA started to change, she said. “A lot of the students came in really thinking that they could just do whatever they wanted to all day. They didn’t really have to do any work. And it was a huge wake up call for, for so many people,” she said.
This meant CCA teachers were spending hours every day trying to track down students who might not have been the best fit for cyber school to try to get them to do their work, she said. “It was a lot more frustrating dealing with a lot of the students who were not attending the lessons or getting help when they needed the help,” Bueno said.
One of Bueno’s students didn’t complete a project correctly. She tried to call him over and over. When she finally reached him, she showed him how to do the assignment and worked through the first questions with him. Then she left the student to work on his own and said she would call back in 45 minutes. But 45 minutes later, the student didn’t answer. He resubmitted his project without even fixing the part of the project they had worked on together.
John Lipchik, a history teacher who taught at CCA for 12 years until retiring in 2023, said very few students would come to his classes and most of his time was spent calling students who weren’t doing work. “The kids wouldn’t answer the phone and the parents wouldn’t answer the phone,” he said. “I would send emails, texts, I even wrote a couple letters to kids and their parents saying, ‘Hey, he’s not doing any work. And most of the time you get zero response, nothing.”
A special education administrator who worked at CCA for three years during the middle of its growth, said she was forced to manage 50 percent more students than CCA said was the target for someone in her position. They all did, she said, and this was hard on staff who were forced to work long hours. “I didn’t think it impacted the quality of the education that students were receiving,” she said, “but it was overwhelming teachers.”
And that made it harder to deal with the increasing number of students doing little or no work, she said. “What I heard a lot from teachers from CCA was, ‘There needs to be a higher level of accountability on the families to make sure their kids are coming to class, make sure their kids are meeting with their teachers and talking with them, make sure they’re answering the phone.” she said.
'IT WAS DONE SO FAST. WE COULDN'T GET ANSWERS'
CCA offered Fraser a year’s salary to leave voluntarily before the board meeting, but Fraser declined. “There’s no way because I am not admitting anything. I did not do anything. And by me settling and agreeing to resign, that turns my back on everything that I built there, on every single person that I poured into, and they’re going to be wondering what happened,” Fraser told PennLive. “So you can offer me a million dollars, I’m gonna say no.”
Rodriguez told CCA’s board during the meeting that Fraser helped her family when they were being threatened with violence. “This man, brave enough, drove to my house because the state police were not willing to help us and got my children’s school things, all their homework, everything they needed to turn into the teachers,” she said. “He drove to my house. He is a warrior for CCA.”
Fraser had built relationships across the school for so many years and also was the only person in senior leadership who had classroom teaching experience. That made other senior leaders worried that his voice had become too influential, according to one former CCA staff member who worked regularly with the top leadership.
“They really felt threatened by him because he was critical of the participation in test scores being down and the quality of the staff not being up because there was just such an influx of hiring that the school had to fight to just stay afloat,” the staff member said.
In response to questions about Fraser, CCA referred PennLive to statements made by its board of trustees at the time. Most of CCA’s board members at the time declined to speak in detail about Fraser. “People here have heard basically one side of the story,” said Ralph Dyer, who was president of the CCA board during the special meeting. “There is a confidentiality requirement that we were restrained by.”
But two parent members of the board said they were confused by what the exact charges against Fraser were and they voted to delay the hearing.
“It was done so fast, and so we couldn’t get answers,” said Marcie Mulligan, one of those board members. “I couldn’t get answers to what happened. It was just crazy.”
CCA’s board voted 5 to 2 to terminate its contract with Fraser, with the two board members who were also parents voting to keep him.
GROWING FAST BUT HANDLING IT
CCA said in a statement that its ability to adapt to challenges, including staffing challenges, was a sign of the school’s strength.
“Identifying where we can strengthen our operations isn’t a sign of struggle; it’s how we continue to succeed,” said Eller, CCA’s spokesperson. “We’ve consistently staffed above our targets, maintained one of the lowest staff turnover rates among Pennsylvania’s public cyber charter schools, and have the highest student and family intent-to-return rate in the sector.”
Pauline Zozos, the director of special education at CCA from 2016 to 2020, said the number of special education students she served doubled during her time at the school–and that was even before the school saw its biggest growth during her final year at the school.
“It was exploding,” she said.
Oliver Morrison/TNS
The challenge wasn’t just hiring and training CCA’s internal staff, Zozos said, but finding a way to manage the many private contractors across the state to work with their special education students.
“There was a speech pathologist that would be going into someone’s home, and I would get a parent call about an incident with a speech teacher that I never even met,” she said. “So from the director’s point of view, that starts to become very, very challenging.”
Diane Adkins, a principal at CCA who retired in 2021 after 14 years, agreed the growth made life hectic but manageable. The school was constantly adding new processes and procedures to handle the influx, she said.
“It was just extremely busy and all hands on deck. You just had to have grit, you had to just dig in and do what needed to be done because these families needed us,” she said. “There were times that we were working till one in the morning because we had to, because it was needed.”
A staff member who worked with homeless students said it felt like her department was doing everything it could just to get students enrolled. Ultimately, she said, they cobbled together resources to help the school’s homeless students but that left little time for other students. “My main concern was what about the kids who are having issues or need supports that are not homeless, that we couldn’t really get to because we were so overloaded with our homeless kids?”
CCA allowed PennLive to speak to two current teachers for about 20 minutes each. Both had been with CCA for less than two years and couldn’t speak to how the school changed when it started adding so many new students.
Joe Porr started out as a long-term substitute last year, which allowed him to adapt to teaching in a cyber school environment. And then just after Thanksgiving, he said CCA started adding about two students per day to his middle school science class until it became full with 60 students. Then they opened up a second class until it was also full of 60 students.
So Porr said he spent a lot of time in the afternoon calling families. “They’re so organized here with their forms and stuff and they have a welcome call form that we go through with every single family just to introduce them to CCA to make them feel comfortable,” he said.
Molly Stewart said she was given an entirely new class of kindergarteners in February of 2024 after serving as a long-term substitute. “I had quite a few students last year where it wasn’t their biological parent that was their learning coach,” Stewart said. “It was grandma, it was aunt, it was a neighbor, it was a guardian. And so that really helped me figure out what the students needed, what kind of supports they were going to need, whether they were going to need more academic or emotional supports, support from me.”
Last year, Stewart was moved up to second grade and she said, between 15 to 25 of her second grade students showed up for her English classes, while her science social studies classes could have as many as 40.
“One of my big things is — because we do have such a large group with us, especially during science and social studies — that we need to make sure that we are being patient,” Stewart said. “And that’s one of those things that tends to be a little difficult in second grade because they get so excited.”
'UNREASONABLE' EXPECTATIONS FOR SUCH A BIG SCHOOL
The school itself has at times told regulators at the Pennsylvania Department of Education [PDE] that its size makes it difficult to adhere to PDE’s administrative requirements.
In 2015 the school told regulators it was slowing its enrollment growth because adding so many new students was making it difficult to meet its academic goals. “With considerable enrollment growth year over year,” the school wrote in its charter application to PDE, “it is clear in hindsight that the goals, while both aggressive and appropriate, were going to be exceptionally difficult to achieve.”
At that time the school had been adding about 1,000 new students per year. More recently it’s been adding around 6,000 new students per year.
In a statement, CCA said, “The education landscape has changed significantly since 2015, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, and CCA has evolved along with it to ensure our students continue to thrive.”
“To be very clear,” CCA’s statement reads, “no CCA student is denied a service or the support that they need to be successful, regardless of the total number of students enrolled.”
CCA also told PDE that its large size makes it impossible for it to adhere to a new legal requirement that every student appear on camera or in-person at least once per week. The requirement was added by Pa. lawmakers last year after some cyber school students, including those at CCA, were physically abused at the hands of parents and caretakers.
In a letter challenging PDE’s interpretation of the new rule, a CCA lawyer said the law was only meant to require schools to provide an opportunity to be seen, not to require that they actually be seen every week. As evidence, CCA’s lawyer said lawmakers couldn’t possibly have meant a school of its size could implement face-to-face contact every week.
“In a school with over 30,000 students and over 2,300 faculty, administrators, and support staff, and several opportunities for a student to be visibly seen each day, PDE’s mandate that all 30,000 students actually be seen and heard each week is unreasonable and impossible of execution.”
'THERE WEREN'T ACADEMIC PEOPLE AT THE TOP'
One CCA mom who spoke up for Fraser said CCA’s culture changed as it added so many new teachers at once. “They didn’t feel as human and connected as they used to because they were all so new and flustered,” she said.
That parent asked not to be identified because she still has students enrolled and worried administrators wouldn’t treat them fairly. She transferred her children from CCA to another cyber charter school for a while but eventually re-enrolled them in CCA. CCA’s large size means it now has more resources for her older children, she said.
“CCA can just provide more opportunities for high schoolers. They partner with more colleges, they have more advanced classes. They’re able to offer a lot more hands-on opportunities and it’s just a more well rounded experience in general,” she said. “So I set aside my differences … and the kids are trucking through.”
Even after such a bitter end to his time there, Fraser agrees CCA is probably still a good school for kids who need a cyber school. But he said enrolling so many students, “is disgusting.”
“There aren’t 35,000 kids out there that are doing better because they’re not in a classroom,” he said. “There are definitely kids that need CCA 100 percent. There are also kids that are hiding.”
Fraser believes much of what happened to him can be explained by personal jealousy because he had been at the school for longer and spent more time building relationships with families and staff than CCA’s top leaders.
Fraser applied to be the new CEO of CCA in 2019 but the board chose Tom Longenecker, the school’s chief operating officer, who was in charge of finances. Fraser said he joked afterward with Longenecker and that they would go out to lunch together and Longencker said Fraser was going to be his right-hand man.
But instead Longenecker hired Roberto Dattore, a lawyer who had previously worked on charter school regulations for the Pennsylvania Department of Education. The betrayal hurt Fraser, he said, but hiring Datorre also seemed like a further signal that the school was prioritizing other parts of the school, such as legal compliance and political support, over academics.
Some CCA staff questioned whether Fraser’s criticisms of CCA were self-serving. A high-level administrator who worked at CCA for more than six years and had worked closely with Fraser said he had serious shortcomings as a leader. “He relied on his relationships with people,” she said, and those didn’t make up for the organizational skills he lacked.
CCA was right to move Fraser out of a top leadership role, she said, but they were wrong to ignore his warnings about how its academic program was suffering.
“Adam’s critique is fair and it resonates because it’s true that there weren’t academic people at the top who were in the room making academic decisions. Academics weren’t at the forefront of the decisions that were being made,” she said. “It was being run like a business without student outcomes or student performance or student attendance or student engagement as being at the forefront of the decision making.”
After being forced out of CCA, Fraser returned to working in brick-and-mortar schools where he could see students in-person again. He was not, it turns out, the kind of educator who could spend most of his time in an office trying to improve numbers on a spreadsheet, he said.
“I was still a people person,” Fraser said. “I needed that human interaction.”
PennLive Editor’s note: This story is part of a series of stories about CCA titled “Virtual Dominance.” You can read the first, second and third story in the series here. The fifth story, also published today, is about how staff say the school didn’t always prioritize quality in its curriculum. Upcoming stories in the series will focus on the transparency practices of CCA’s board of trustees and why so little is known about how much students are learning at Pa.’s fastest growing school.
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