“Nobody had ever come to us with an official proposal, no one ever pitched an official plan,” Hermen said.

At a special work session of the Sedona-Oak Creek School District held on Jan. 29 to propose the coming year’s budget, Randy Hawley and Heather Hermen, Governing Board president and vice president respectively, took time to address rumors surrounding the pursuit of a collegiate preparatory school — in particular, Arizona State University Preparatory — to occupy the inoperative Big Park Community School. 
 

“There is no plan to have that school in our community,” Hermen declared at the session. 

For representatives of the district, this signifies the final refutation of a confusing saga, while for others in the Village of Oak Creek — particularly those involved in the ad hoc Big Park Education Exploratory Committee — it represents heartbreak. 

Almost as soon as the district shut down BPCS back in May of last year, community members began mobilizing to find alternatives outside of SOCSD — whether that meant moving to another education provider, or bringing one here. The Exploratory Committee has been the most fruitful assemblage of parents and community members seeking to do the latter. 

For Herman and Hawley, there is a sense that the district was unnecessarily left out of a lot of the process, forcing them to play catch-up with BPEEC. It had been clear since the spring closure that the relationship between the board and some community members in the Village had become contentious, and things reached a head recently when BPEEC began circulating a memo to newsrooms and on social media.

The memo starts by introducing BPEEC as “a group of volunteers including parents, grandparents, educators and interested community members who volunteered to respond to the sudden closing of our neighborhood school.” 

“Through research of schooling options, we have attracted a research university interested in partnering with the Sedona-Oak Creek School District to reopen and operate the vacant Big Park Community School,” the memo continues, though it fails to mention who, exactly, had allegedly been attracted. 

The bolded focal sentence of the memo reads: “This is a ‘win-win’ solution for everyone, providing needed income and professional development for the school district and an excellent neighborhood school for our children.” 

Hawley and Hermen have repeatedly denied that there was ever an ongoing or pending process with the district and stressed that no research university contacted them or any official representative of SOCSD. 

“Nobody had ever come to us with an official proposal, no one ever pitched an official plan,” Hermen said, who was alarmed to see the memo being passed around on Facebook and other sites.

District Meets With BPEEC 

The BPEEC only maintains a single Facebook page with a handful of posts. It does not list any members nor leaders, nor any contact information. There is no nonprofit organization with the BPEEC name, nor similar names, registered with the Arizona Corporation Commission. The group has never contacted Larson Newspapers to announce any public meetings nor any events to discuss plans with VOC residents, nor are any past or upcoming meetings included on the group’s Facebook page. 

Hawley said that there indeed had been meetings with folks purportedly affiliated with BPEEC but that each one had left the district more in the dark. 

“Heather, [SOCSD Superintendent] Denny [Dearden] and I had had three separate meetings with four individuals,” Hawley said. 

“They won’t tell us anything. We say, ‘tell us what you’re doing, what you’re planning,’ and they say, ‘well, it’s a secret, we can’t tell you.’”

According to Hawley, when asked how their “win-win” plan would benefit the district, the group repeated that they couldn’t divulge that information. Hawley said that though it was clear a charter school was involved, the group refused to disclose the name of the institute or its curriculum. Hawley and Dearden then reportedly sought to meet with the entire BPEEC to hopefully discuss things further. 

“We were told by an individual that the only way they [BPEEC] will meet with you will be if you guarantee in advance that you are going to let us rent Big Park Community School,” Hawley said. 

“How can we in good faith lease one of our facilities to somebody that we don’t even know what’s going to go in there?” 

This condition derailed any chance of meeting with BPEEC, Hawley said. Rebekah Hlasny, de facto spokeswoman and communications person for BPEEC, claimed that the group had been resorting to extreme secrecy for fear of having their ideas precluded by a district already eager to dismiss educational efforts outside of its control. 

“The district made clear early on [after the closure of Big Park] that if you try this we will squash you, that we will stand in your way,” Hlasny said. 

“We wanted to wait until we had something solid, something tangible and serious to offer,” she said. While official discussions ceased, the rumor mill kept churning — this time, bearing the name of an actual organization, Arizona State University Preparatory Academy. 

“I emailed [ASU Prep] and said that we had been hearing in the community some rumblings and that their name was mentioned and I thought as a professional institution that they would want to know that their name had been mentioned,” Hermen said. 

In the email, Hermen disclosed the difficulties that the district and the city of Sedona are facing — declining enrollment, affordable housing shortages, etc. — and that it was imperative therefore that the district meet with ASU Prep immediately to discuss the situation. She didn’t receive a response. 

“Then, some former employees of the district came to me and said, ‘we can’t wait to work at the charter school at Big Park Community School and we love the fact that it’s ASU Prep’ and I had to really kind of hold back my choking in public,” Hermen said. 

‘Secret’ Campus Tour 

The board leaders said they were also shocked to discover — well after the fact — that a meeting was held in the Village between representatives from ASU Prep and BPEEC on Oct. 10 and that a tour of the closed Big Park school facility was given. 

“We found out about it when one of our tenants at the space called and said your former principal is touring people on the facilities of Big Park Community School,” Hermen said.  According to Hawley, the tour leader attempted to use her key to get inside but since the building had been re-keyed, she asked the current tenant of the building to let her and the touring group into the building. 

“Hearing that made us feel very uncomfortable,” he said. Hlasny disputed the claim that the group actually entered the facility, stating that the ASU Prep representatives were merely led around the perimeter of the building. In light of all this information, Hermen made a more urgent attempt to get in touch with ASU Prep, this one being successful. 

ASU Prep Pulls Out 

ASU Prep President and CEO  Beatriz Rendon, SOCSD Superintendent Dearden and Hermen had a conference call. According to the Hermen, Rendon said that a charter school in the Village wasn’t going to happen — not in August 2019, not in August 2020. The meeting prompted a follow-up call between the district and ASU Prep that included Don Groves, a member of BPEEC. In that most recent conference call, Hermen said that it was made clear to ASU Prep that the district will be trusting its superintendent — who took over right around the time of the BPCS’ closure last year — and administrative team to create to a solution regarding Big Park. 

“We’re not interested in having an institution that would compete with what we’re doing and pull from our daily membership, and [ASU Prep] completely agreed,” Hermen said. 

ASU Prep’s stipulation of district cooperation wasn’t met, thus any interest it may have expressed in the Village was definitively withdrawn. 

“There’s been a lot of tears shed because there’s been hundreds and hundreds of hours put into this,” Hlasny said regarding BPEEC’s sentiments upon learning the conclusions of the conference call. 

“There were days when, sure, all of our schools were thriving and we had a lot of children in this community. But I’ve also watched it change, where there isn’t affordable housing now, there aren’t enough high-paying jobs to make up for that,” Hermen said. She then cited data from Yavapai County District 3 Supervisor Randy Garrison that shows Yavapai as being the third-oldest county in state in terms of median population age. 

“But I also feel the human piece of it, because I have a child, he went to Big Park, and it’s emotional, it’s sensitive and it hurts that our community school was closed but it’s also one of those things that I believe we have a choice to either say, ‘I’m going to sit and live in that anger and it’s going to drive every decision I’m going to make from here on out’ but I also believe that if some of that energy could be channeled into actually helping and we all work together, we could create that amazing thing that they want to start brand new,” Hermen said. 

“It’s right here, and it doesn’t need to be a solicited university-based education from down in the [Phoenix] Valley. We can create it here because we now have the leadership to do that,” she said. 

Hlasny asserted that the district had taken a narrow, bottom-line-only approach to the idea of an ASU Prep charter, and that Dearden has yet to offer a real alternative. 

“Attaching the ASU name to the district would be incredibly attractive to parents and kids,” she said. 

She claimed that the high-standards curriculum of ASU Prep would be shared districtwide and that even though students in the Big Park facility would be outside of SOCSD, they would eventually feed back into the district, benefiting everyone as rigorous students. 

“Right now the district has nothing that’s working. This was something that’s fresh and new and tangible and people know the ASU name,” Hlasny said. 

When asked what message BPEEC had for the district after the dissolution of its ASU Prep plan, Hlasny said, “I think we need something bigger than us to get us healthy again. If you keep doing what you’ve always done you’re going to get what you’ve always received.” 

That was also stated word-for-word by Dearden at the Jan. 29 work session: The issue has reportedly caused wounds and the district and the community want solutions — the difference is where they are placing their hope.