Here’s a look inside the controversial Camelot program

Drake White, 18, was two years behind academically when he was sent to the transitional school at Camelot Academy in Escambia County, Pensacola, Fla., after being charged with simple assault for threatening a teacher.

The judge gave him probation — and Camelot gave him a last chance to graduate on time.

Drake is on track to be among the 90 percent of this school’s 196 students in grades 6-12 to graduate if he passes one more class this summer.

In an interview Monday with the Ledger-Enquirer, Drake summed up the difference between Camelot Academy and his regular school: “They talk to me not like a regular teacher would. They keep it professional, but they talk to me like I’m a person instead of just a student.”

Camelot Education, the private, for-profit company based in Austin, Texas, and recommended by Muscogee County School District Superintendent David Lewis to run three alternative education programs for $6.4 million annually, invited the public to visit here to see one of its 43 campuses in six states. Eighteen folks took advantage of the offer, and the Ledger-Enquirer was along for the bus chartered ride.

The bus left the Muscogee County Public Education Center at 7 a.m., 11 hours before the Muscogee County School Board is scheduled to meet there at 6 p.m. for its monthly meeting. On the agenda is District 8 representative’s Frank Myers suggestion to reconsider the April 10 vote. That’s when the board voted 5-3 to table the controversial recommendation for three months and form a citizens advisory committee to investigate the issue. A month later, such a committee hasn’t been established, and the board and community seem just as divided.

District 7 representative Cathy Williams is the only member of the nine-person school board on this trip to visit Camelot Academy in Pensacola. She also was the only board member to accept Camelot’s invitation to visit Chicago last week to see the three programs MCSD is considering: a transitional program for students with severe discipline violations, a therapeutic day program for students with severe emotional and behavioral disorders, and an accelerated program for over-age and under-accredited students.

If the MCSD board approves, all three programs would be located in the former Marshall Middle School.

The board appears to have two swing votes who will decide this issue: Kia Chambers, the board’s lone countywide representatives, who made the April 10 motion to table the recommendation; and Mark Cantrell, the District 6 representative who was absent from the April 10 meeting. The Ledger-Enquirer texted Chambers and Cantrell this morning, but neither has responded.

Drake would like to tell them how to vote.

He doesn’t have a father at home, but he has positive male role models around him at Camelot, he said. Struggling to control his anger while growing up, Drake said, he felt he was more likely to end up in prison than graduating from high school.

“I was frustrated because I didn’t have a voice,” he said, adding that he wants to become a writer. “This school has given me the chance to speak out.”

A March 8 story on Slate.com titled “That Place Was Like a Prison” reported allegations of Camelot employees abusing students with overly aggressive responses to discipline problems in five cities: Reading, Pa.; Lancaster, Pa.; Philadelphia; New Orleans; and Pensacola, Fla.

“Those are allegations are not true,” Drake said.

In its 17-page response to Slate’s questions, Camelot wrote, “With the exception of an isolated incident in Reading, PA in which we immediately investigated and terminated multiple employees, Camelot has had no founded child abuse cases or lawsuits involving our students over the last decade. Your narrative is formulated using fewer than 10 incidents from the almost 5,940,000 daily interactions over a period of 10 years.”

Camelot Academy science teacher Harrietta Hall, a 19-year educator, has been working at this transitional school since its inception seven years ago.

She taught in Valley and Tuskegee, Ala., then came to Pensacola for this opportunity after being laid off. She was attracted to this alternative school concept because of the frustration she experienced with the way regular schools too often deal with student discipline.

“They use write-ups and send them out, but they send them back for another write-up,” Hall said. “There was a lot of paperwork before you can get anything done.”

Camelot teachers instruct children with the same curriculum the state and district require. The difference in this transitional high school is that classes are approximately half the size, Hall said. So they can slow the pace for students who need extra attention and accelerate the pace for students who can and want to catch up on missed credits.

“With a smaller class,” she said, “we build more of a rapport with students.”

This story was originally published May 15, 2017 at 4:04 PM with the headline "Here’s a look inside the controversial Camelot program."