Prime Prep Academy opened the doors of its Oak Cliff campus on Monday as promised. Students went to class, teachers taught, Deion Sanders tweeted inane things. Prime Time delivers again.
There are, however, some unresolved issues, and not just with the athletic program, which has been banned from district play.
In May, we noted that the charter school had not yet jumped through several bureaucratic hoops. It lacked a certificate of occupancy for one, a prerequisite under Texas Education Agency rules. It also had yet to get a specific use permit from the city to allow it to operate a charter school on property zoned for a church, which the building on Ann Arbor used to be.
The school received its certificate of occupancy late last week, albeit a temporary one. That's enough to satisfy TEA requirements and means the building has been deemed safe, but it also means that the school has not yet completed the lengthy process of obtaining a use permit. As a matter of fact, it just started, filing a zoning change request, which you'll find below, only recently.
According to the docs, the request is tentatively scheduled to go before the City Plan Commission next week, at which point the public will be able to voice its support or opposition to the zoning change. After that, the request will go to the full City Council, which will weigh the commission's recommendation and ultimately decide whether Prime Prep should be able to use the building. At that point, the school year will be a couple of months old, which seems a little late to determine if the school should be allowed to operate.
After all, who on the City Council is going to vote to effectively shut down a school, regardless of how the neighbors feel?
