One of Orange County’s oldest charter schools closed this week, a mid-year shutdown that will force more than 200 students to switch campuses starting next week.
The board of directors for Legends Academy — initially known as the Nap Ford Community School — cited “unsustainable financial challenges” as the reason it was closing in the middle of its 25th school year.
The school’s students will need to attend new schools when the winter holiday break ends Jan. 6 , and the board said Legends is working with Orange County Public Schools on that transition.
Legends, located on church-owned property in west Orlando, had 223 students enrolled as of Dec. 3, according to OCPS enrollment data. It was a kindergarten-to-eighth-grade school.
The “difficult” decision was made “after careful review of the school’s financial condition and long-term viability,” the board said in a statement. “This decision was not made lightly and does not diminish the impact the school has had on generations of families.”
The statement did not provide any details on the school’s financial troubles, and school leaders could not be immediately reached Tuesday. The board voted Monday to close the school, and a spokesman said a recording of that meeting would be available later Tuesday.
Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run, and they operate under a contract, or charter, approved by the local school board.
The school opened in Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood in 2001, named for the late Nap Ford, a former Orlando city council member who had championed a new public school for that part of the city.
In 1970 and 1971, as part of a court-ordered integration effort, the Orange school district closed two all-Black schools in Parramore, leaving the area without a public campus. Children in the predominately Black neighborhood then were bused to as many as eight schools in other parts of the county.
Ford, who died in 1998, and others longed for a school in Parramore again, and charter school supporters saw the small school as a way to provide a neighborhood campus for at least some of Parramore’s kids. The school opened on city of Orlando property in August, 2001, with support from both the city council and the Orange County School Board.
The Nap Ford school moved out of Parramore in 2016 when the property it used was slated to become part of the University of Central Florida’s downtown campus. It was later renamed Legends Academy.
OCPS opened a traditional public school for K-8 students in Parramore in 2017, the first such campus in nearly 50 years. OCPS Academic Center for Excellence now enrolls about 750 children.