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The Indiana Charter School Board approved the merger of two Indianapolis charter schools and granted a charter to an Indianapolis Public Schools school on Thursday.
Ace Prep Academy, a K-6 school near the city’s fairgrounds neighborhood, will transfer its charter to Circle City Prep, which runs an elementary and middle school totaling roughly 400 students on the far eastside. The move will make Ace Prep one of three schools in the Circle City network.
Meanwhile, the Cold Spring School in the IPS autonomous network of Innovation schools will convert to a charter school in a move that the school leader estimates will bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra revenue. Cold Spring is one of a few Innovation schools that is not currently a charter school, but still operates autonomously through its own nonprofit.
In addition, the charter board gave the green light to a collaborative of microschools hoping to launch east of Indianapolis.
School leaders at Ace Prep and Circle City Prep hope the merger of both charters will create cost efficiencies across a three-school network. Ace Prep will stay in its current leased building.
The small Ace Prep opened in 2016 and boasts strong academics — its most recent proficiency rate on the state’s third grade IREAD test stood at 90.5%. But its enrollment has fluctuated in recent years and is down from roughly 165 students in 2019-20 to 131 this year, according to state records.
“We just want to make sure we’re taking the steps to be as stable as possible financially so we can continue to offer the high-level academic rigor that we pride ourselves on,” Principal Amanda Liles told the board Thursday to justify the proposed merger.
Ace Prep will also be able to utilize Circle City Prep’s administrative staff to handle financial and hiring matters, leaders said. And the merger would allow Ace, a relatively small school, to team up with Circle City students for extracurricular activities such as basketball.
The merger will also provide school transportation for families with children who attend both Ace Prep and Circle City Prep, and an average $10,000 increase in salary for Ace Prep staff.
“We see this not as a turnaround or anything of that nature, but instead to support Ace to continue to do the real work that they are doing,” said Circle City Prep founder Megan Murphy. “Support them in infrastructure, to hit their enrollment targets, and also provide some extracurricular opportunities and clubs that their families have been asking for but they haven’t yet had the infrastructure to be able to provide.”
Cold Spring to convert to a charter school
Cold Spring, the first IPS school to opt into the Innovation Network in 2016, will also transition to a charter school after securing a 15-year charter.
The move will provide over $400,000 in additional revenue to the school, since as a charter school it will operate as a separate local educational agency instead of receiving funds through IPS, which allocates money using a student-based funding formula, Cody Stipes, Cold Spring’s chief operating officer, told the charter board.
Operating as its own local educational agency will also make Cold Spring eligible for more grants, he said.
“With that type of financial resources we can really invest in our students,” Stipes said, noting the possibility for more STEM opportunities and access to foreign language classes. “All those things their most affluent peers in the entire state have access to, we want to be able to make sure they have access to that.”
Cold Spring was one of the relatively few high-performing IPS schools that opted into the district’s Innovation Network.The K-8 school has continued to outperform IPS as a whole on state test scores.
The school will maintain its Innovation Network agreement with IPS. Cold Spring will still use IPS transportation, food, and technology services.
Charter approved for new microschool collaborative
The charter board also approved a charter for the Indiana Microschool Collaborative, a network of small schools that hopes to launch within the Eastern Hancock school district’s boundaries and eventually expand statewide.
The network will offer a shared “instructional framework” but will ultimately create several small schools, with each tailored to the community’s needs, according to the charter application.
Career Academy Network, which operates five schools in South Bend, also won approval to switch authorizers from Education One at Trine University to the state charter board. The school network said in its application that the switch would provide Career Academy a “tremendous” cost benefit.
The vote also includes approval for Career Academy Network to open a sixth elementary school in the fall of 2027 at a location yet to be determined.
Correction: 5/9/2025: A previous version of this story gave an incorrect opening year and enrollment trajectory for Ace Prep.
Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Lawrence Township schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.
