This article was first published at TAPinto Newark.

Just when it looked like the four-year battle for the Maple Street school building was coming to an end, the Newark school district has doubled down on its multi-million dollar quest to take the building back from a charter school. 

Last week, Essex County Superior Court Judge Lisa M. Adubato ordered the Newark Board of Education to pay $768,487 in damages to Friends of TEAM Charter School. The Newark school board had sued Friends of Team in 2020 to try to reverse the 2018 sale of the building to the charter school. 

The order came five months after Judge Adubato had dismissed the lawsuit, calling it a “shameful” waste of taxpayer dollars. 

The school district said on Thursday that it plans to appeal the case that has already cost more in legal fees than the building was originally sold for in the first place. Friends of TEAM is a nonprofit that supports KIPP charter schools in Newark.

More than 560 students attend KIPP Seek Academy at the Maple Street building. The school is part of the high-performing KIPP network that emphasizes college readiness. One third of Newark’s students attend a public charter school. 

TAPinto Newark has been keeping a running tab of the legal fees that the public entities involved in the case have been spending. As of December 2023, the Newark Board of Education alone had spent $1.33 million on legal fees stemming from its lawsuit against Friends of TEAM as well as the Newark Housing Authority (NHA), which had originally been engaged to help sell a portfolio of underutilized or dilapidated school buildings when the district was under state control.

In 2017, the Newark Housing Authority sold the Maple Avenue School for $1.2 million to a private developer, and the proceeds went to the district. That developer, Hanini Group, had planned to build housing at the location, but instead sold it to Friends of TEAM, which spent $10 million renovating the building to convert it into what is now KIPP Seek Academy.

As of December 2023, the Newark Housing Authority had been forced to spend $815,000 in legal fees and Friends of Team had spent nearly $300,000 in legal fees. TAPinto Newark has submitted requests to all three organizations to ascertain their legal spending on this case from January 2024 to the present. 

When Roger Leon came into power as the first superintendent after the return to local control, he stated that he would get some of those buildings “unsold” and commenced a four-year legal battle to use the courts in a way that Judge Adubato said was unprecedented.

According to a transcript of the judge’s comments in Essex County Superior Court, Adubato called some of the school district’s positions “disingenuous” and “baffling.” 

In asking for the court to undo the sale of a building made by parties after the district sold the building, she said the district “would have this court turn decades of jurisprudence on its head.” 

In addition, if entities who purchase properties with clean deeds run the risk of having those properties seized by previous owners, it “would wreak havoc on our recording system.” 

The district wasn’t always antagonistic to charter schools. Prior to Leon’s ascension to superintendent, the district and the two largest charter schools collaborated on topics such as literacy, teacher preparation and college application and success. In the past few years, however, that collaboration turned into litigation. 

The district sued North Star Academy Charter School and the New Jersey Department of Education after the state, citing North Star’s academic results for students, granted it an expansion of 490 new seats. 

North Star is the largest charter school organization in Newark. Studies show that Newark’s charter schools are among the highest performing in the nation.

The families in the Maple building specifically chose to enroll their children in a KIPP school rather than a district school. Leon and the school district have not said what they would do with the building, or the existing students, if it were to prevail in court. 

“We appreciate the court’s decision to order that a significant portion of KIPP New Jersey’s expenses associated with the multi-year lawsuit be covered,” KIPP said in a statement. “Our focus remains on providing Newark students with high-quality education and safe, supportive learning environments.”

In its press release vowing to appeal, Newark public schools suggested that the judge was biased in her decision. 

“On a wall in the Essex County Courthouse, not far from Judge Adubato’s courtroom, a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reads, ‘… the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ In this instance, the blindfold on Lady Justice appears to have punctured holes.”