Change is Hard.

The LCCA Leadership Transition

We are at a transition point at LCCA. The Head Principal has resigned mid school year over the board’s decision to appoint an executive director over LCCA, Mr. John Wu. Mr. Wu sat on the board for much of last year, and stepped down prior to assuming the role.

This has created uncertainty for many. Mr. Wu is not a teacher. His background is in business, and his experience is in project management, business growth, and operations.

Teachers, particularly, have expressed frustration, and even called for a vote of no confidence in the school board president at the last board meeting. (The board voted unanimously in favor of keeping him.) I’m sympathetic to the teacher’s feelings on this. I’m not a teacher, but I’m an educator and a physician. Keeping non-physicians out of my decision making and daily practice is a high priority for me. Having a boss who doesn’t understand what I do on a day-to-day basis would be a potential nightmare.

Moreover, while hospitals may be run as a necessary-but-sometimes-uneasy marriage of business and medicine, schools are generally not. Hillsdale’s charter school model emphasizes the autonomy of the Head Principal, and trains school board members to stay out of the principal’s way and focus on high-level governance. Appointing an executive director to help the principal in the school’s operations seems, on the surface, extremely out of sync with this guidance.

So, what was the board thinking?

After all, the demand for Hillsdale’s classical education model (and school choice in general) is immense. As of 2021, Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative (BCSI) schools were serving more than 14,500 K-12 students, and over 8,000 students were on waitlists to attend per a 2021 BCSI charter application. That means, on average, Hillsdale’s BCSI charter schools have a waitlist that’s ~55% of their currently enrolled student body. (Some extremely healthy schools have waitlists that are nearly double enrollment, like Atlanta Classical Academy’s 1200+ wait list.)

This is where things get interesting.

This is a graph of our waitlist numbers at LCCA over the last four years. LCCA’s wait list has, quite literally, dropped off a cliff and has been stuck at rock bottom for a full year.

Meanwhile, this is a table of our current enrollment. Remember that we didn’t start with K-12. We started with K-9, and added a class every year. As you can see, this resulted in hiding the fact that while our waitlist was shrinking, so was enrollment. This year was the first year we did not add a grade, and as of October 2025, we were already down 18 students from the year prior.

But if students on the wait list don’t affect funding, how does this really affect us? In other words, how bad can these numbers be?

Scary bad, unfortunately. These numbers do not bode well.

Charter schools are fragile. More than 1 in 4 charter schools closes its doors within the first five years, and insufficient enrollment accounted for 47 percent of all charter closures. Without a waitlist, every departing student leaves a hole. Our school has already been withering for the last two years. Not quickly, but steadily.

Financially, lenders use waitlist numbers as an indicator of charter school stability. As a school, we could really use a loan to help with construction of a single campus. We will need a strong waitlist to get one.

In this situation, the board would have been irresponsible not to act. I can imagine them asking “Where did our waitlist go? How has retention been at the school?”

As far as I know, the Head Principal never answered the retention question publicly despite being asked to do so by the board on multiple occasions over the past year. Perhaps she didn’t know, or perhaps she didn’t want others to know. All we know is that we did not see any numbers until Mr. Wu’s first board meeting as the executive director last month.

From that data, we see that over our four years, 895 students have enrolled at LCCA, and 350 have left, leaving us with 39% attrition. For the high schoolers, the classes of 2027-2029 have 65-70% attrition — and counting.

That’s what happened to the waitlist. They came, and they went.

Even 39% is a painful rate of attrition. With a waitlist nearing zero, LCCA will not survive as a school if this trend keeps on.

But why is this happening?

Fortunately, the LCCA’s charter contract requires regular parent surveys, which can help inform the board. When the results came in from the most recent survey, the principal released a very sterilized version to the public suggesting all was well.

School leaders, including the board, got a more substantial version that had a LOT more data in it. (Spoiler: All was not well.)

Here are the parent comments from the 2025 school survey about the head principal. These were not made publicly available by the principal, for obvious reasons. (Here is the full report if anyone is interested, which was also not made available to the public.)

Almost all areas of the school’s evaluation were largely positive to highly positive. The families at LCCA are not here by accident — they came for a rigorous classical education. But by the data, the Head Principal herself was an outlier, and had a hand in personally driving people away from the school. I know this not just from the reports, but from multiple friends who have had difficult, even terrible, experiences with her. Go read the comments if you doubt this has been happening.

I haven’t been this direct before because I don’t like sharing unflattering things. I believe in second chances, grace, and in treating mistakes as opportunities to grow. As an adopted Wisconsinite, I’m a staunch believer in ‘Midwest Nice.’ People ought to be defined by their best moments, not their worst. But sometimes truth has to be shared, even if it’s uncomfortable.

Despite claims to the contrary, the board’s decision to take action was anything but rushed. If anything, they should have acted sooner. LCCA persisted in this no-waitlist, falling-enrollment state for a full year before Mr. Wu was offered the job.

As I wrote in my last post, experiences with the Head Principal vary widely. Criticism of her has been difficult for some to accept, particularly the teachers, who she genuinely and staunchly supported. Some are convinced that there is no valid reason for restructuring school leadership.

As a result, there’s now a petition circulating for parents to call for a vote of no confidence in the school board president. There have been pseudo-secret “word of mouth only” parent meetings. There has been talk that the board acted rashly and irresponsibly. Since that sort of communication can inspire fear, confusion, and anger in any who don’t realize that they only have half of the story, I felt it was important to share a more complete perspective.

With permission of the mom involved in the story, I will share an illustrative example of what some families have been dealing with.

One night, a woman in LCCA’s parental Facebook group posted pictures from an email exchange she’d had with the Head Principal. Her son had been having a hard time in his special ed class, and his special education teacher had taken disciplinary action against the child. His mother was not informed of this, and was understandably upset.

Meeting with administration did not resolve the issue, and instead resulted in the mom pulling her student from the school and filing a complaint with the state.

She then submitted a formal ORR asking for the records the school had of her son.

The Head Principal sent the following reply, asking her to pay over $600 for the records. (Note that the principal set up the most expensive ORR system possible by charging families the highest hourly wage of any employee at the school — her own. This is explicitly illegal — fees for staff time for ORR’s must be billed at the hourly rate of the lowest-paid employee capable of performing the task.)

The mom, not one to lie down, called the bluff by citing her legal right to access all information regarding her own son free of charge because of FERPA. The principal responded by informing the mother that — just kidding — there were no records, as they’d transferred them when the child left the school.

So the principal was willing to charge $600 to this mom to look for records that she didn’t have, and got to that number by illegally using herself as the “lowest paid employee capable of performing the task” when she did the math.

If this exchange is representative of how some parents were treated, you can see why there might have been some negative comments made about the Head Principal. Judging by the sheer number of comments on the survey, this sort of thing must have happened a lot.

The board, however, was still willing to support the Head Principal. They recognized that weakness in one area does not negate strength in another. Parents and teachers were (and are) generally satisfied by the educational experience at LCCA, and the Head Principal was a key figure in making that happen. But it was clear she needed some help in interfacing with parents and maintaining a wait list.

The solution? Split her duties. Enter Mr. John Wu. Under the board’s proposed plan, Mr. Wu would help with finances, retention, and other non-academic activities, leaving the Head Principal in charge of the parts of the school she had the credentials for — the academics, and the oversight of the teachers.

This made a lot of sense.

In response, the Head Principal abruptly announced her resignation, leaving LCCA in a lurch. Predictable? Perhaps. No one likes to feel criticized, but it was hardly her only choice. The board had structured things to preserve her core role, and continue at her $160,000/yr salary, yet she still chose to resign.

Hillsdale did not like this development as, again, they favor a principal-run school model. But if LCCA is to survive, that will mean having a principal who can work with families, nurture a healthy waitlist, AND preserve the classical education and Hillsdale affiliation of LCCA.

As parents, teachers, students, and the board of directors, we have a chance to help with that as a unified LCCA community. We have faced challenges before — including temporary loss of the charter, a lack of proper licensing, and other hurdles. We have overcome them all.

As parents, the best thing we can do right now is support Mr. Wu and the board as they look for a replacement Head Principal as soon as possible. We should encourage Hillsdale to support us during this transition despite any feelings of frustration. We can support the teachers by expressing our appreciation for their work and by assuring them that we want a true Hillsdale style classical education for our kids, which is why many of them are here.

If we do, all of this turmoil will be little more than a blip in our school’s legacy. If we do not, we make it harder for our school to succeed and increase the chance that our school becomes another statistic.

Let’s be prudent in our choices.