As enrollment kept shrinking, Monica Green felt the future she had fought for slipping away as her public charter school edged toward collapse.
Green founded Capital Village Public Charter School in 2020 during a burst of charter openings in the nation’s capital. As executive director and principal, she’s spent more than five years building a small, social-justice-oriented middle campus in Northeast Washington that promised close relationships with families and individualized learning for students.
But not enough students showed up, straining the school’s finances almost from the start. At the beginning of this school year, Green hoped a last-ditch push to boost enrollment might spark a comeback. Instead, she learned in the fall that her student body had shrunk by nearly a third, leaving the school with too few students — and too little money — to survive.
In December, Capital Village’s board voted to relinquish its charter. The school will shut down at the end of the academic year.
Capital Village’s closure comes at an inflection pointfor Washington’s charter sector. After decades of rapid growth, public charter schools, which now educate almost half of the city’s nearly 100,000 public school students, are confronting demographic shifts, rising costs and intense competition for students. Enrollment growth has slowed — and is projected to decline — leaving small, stand-alone schools particularly vulnerable when enrollment falls short of expectations.
Because birth rates have been declining for nearly two decades — reaching a record low in 2024 — schools across the country are bracing for fewer students and less funding, though large charter networks and traditional school districts are generally better able to absorb enrollment swings without closing altogether.
Anne Herr, a senior director at the D.C. Charter School Alliance, said Capital Village’s story reflects the risks inherent in running a small school in a crowded market. Herr emphasized that most charter schools in the city continue to meet enrollment targets and balance their budgets. But she acknowledged that the bar for survival has risen.
“If you’re going to open or sustain a school, you have to make a stronger case,” she said.
In the 1990s, the struggling D.C. Public Schools system drove families to seek alternatives, spurring the creation of the charter sector. Over the next three decades, enrollment surged as families flocked to the new schools — rising by as much as 17 percent in some years — and was still growing by 3 to 5 percent annually a decade ago, according to data from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which goes back to the 2007-2008 school year. Charter school enrollment grew from about 22,000 students in 2007 to roughly 47,500 today.
But that explosive expansion has stalled. Last school year, charter enrollment was essentially flat, increasing just 0.4 percent from the year before.
Eboni-Rose Thompson, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education, said that after years of rapid growth by charters, D.C. Public Schools has improved and is competing for what analysts say will soon be a dwindling number of students.
“We’ve opened a lot more schools than we’ve closed,” she said. “But we’re at capacity.”
The pressure is already showing. Four charter schools have closed in the past two years, all at least in part because of low enrollment or re-enrollment. Capital Village will make five — and there could be more.
In January, the D.C. Public Charter School Board denied one school’s charter renewal but placed it on three years’ probation to address concerns about enrollment, weak academics and financial instability. The board renewed another school’s charter but imposed conditions after raising “serious concerns” about how it provided special-education services and reported student discipline data.
The board is still reviewing certain schools’ charter renewal applications and whether to allow them to keep operating, a spokeswoman said.
‘Every student matters’
When Green opened Capital Village in 2020, she intentionally kept the student body small, a core part of her vision to create a more intimate school where administrators, teachers and parents knew each other by name. In fact, the size was part of her pitch to families. The school would have a maximum of 45 students per grade, two teachers in every classroom, and a mission centered on social justice and serving those who had struggled elsewhere. The school has an 11:1 student-teacher ratio. More than three-fourths of students are economically disadvantaged, and 41 percent have a disability.
“A big part of our mission is to work with students, especially those who are often overlooked and have a hard time in other settings, to reach their full potential,” Green said in an interview.
If the size was a selling point, it was also a risk.
“When you have a very small student body, every student matters,” Herr said, “and an enrollment dip can really be catastrophic.”
In 2023, the city’s public charter school board placed Capital Village on a financial monitoring list and issued a corrective action plan the following year. During an October 2024 meeting, agency staff laid out the core problem that had plagued the school from the start: Enrollment had consistently fallen short of projections even as operating costs surged.
School leaders signed a 15-year lease on a 21,000-square-foot facility before opening in fall 2020 — about 40 percent larger than planners had estimated they would need two years earlier. They expected the school to grow to roughly 160 students within two years, but it never came close. Capital Village peaked at 108 students during the 2022-23 school year.
Because D.C. schools are funded based on enrollment, the gap between projected and actual students left a hole in the school’s budget. Operating expenses climbed more than 75 percent over three years, largely because the school was paying rent for a building far too big for its student body. Cash reserves steadily eroded. In the 2023-2024 school year, federal pandemic relief funds began to fade, exacerbating the financial crunch.
Green agreed to a hiring freeze and began exploring layoffs for what she described as “out-of-classroom, nonessential” staff. She also renegotiated the school’s lease, reducing the amount of space it rented by at least a third.
Even with those changes, the school remained on shaky footing.
At an April 2025 meeting, charter board members voted to allow Capital Village to remain open, but not without warnings. While math and reading proficiency rates had improved, they were still about half the citywide average. The school also continued to report one of the highest midyear withdrawal rates and lowest re-enrollment rates in the city.
One board member compared the vote to renew the school’s charter to giving a student a “D” grade — technically passing, but barely.
“It really is gravely concerning,” said Shantelle Wright, the charter board’s chair at the time.
Those concerns proved valid. Capital Village had hoped to at least maintain the previous year’s enrollment of 94 students. Audited data later showed that just 66 students had enrolled at the start of this school year.
Green said she realized the school could no longer survive financially.
Having seen the sudden implosion in 2024 of Eagle Academy Public Charter School, which closed days before classes were to start and left families scrambling to find new schools, Green and other Capital Village leaders decided to notify parents as early as possible.
In December, the school sent a letter about the closure and held several virtual meetings, Green said. She urged families to go to EdFest, a day-long event where parents can explore K-8 school options across the city. Green attended herself, encouraging families to consider Social Justice Public Charter School, which she said shares Capital Village’s mission and educational approach. She said she expects to join Social Justice next school year, though her role has not been finalized.
“We are making good progress with transitioning staff and families,” she wrote Thursday in an email.
Thompson, the state board of education member, praised Green for giving families more notice.
“This is the responsible way to do it,” she said. “Families aren’t being blindsided in August.”
Capital Village’s collapse also underscores a tension at the heart of the charter movement: Autonomy cuts both ways. Educators have the freedom to open schools with distinctive programming but must shoulder district-level responsibilities — without the scale of DCPS to spread the burden across more than 100 schools.
“We forget schools are businesses, too,” one public charter school board member said, adding, “Your business is to educate children.”
For Green, that reality is painfully clear.
“I still believe in what we were trying to do,” she said. “But belief doesn’t pay rent. It doesn’t pay salaries.”
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