Note: this excerpt is from an email sent by its author, Sean McWilliams, to WVA parents.
Until recently, I was the father of three WVA students. My seven-year-old, Charlotte, was having severe issues getting bullied in school, but after many failed attempts to resolve the situation, in November we made a plan with Holly Honeycutt to accelerate Charlotte into 2nd grade. However, weeks later, Heidi Treu overruled Holly, then John Treu completely took over the conversation from Holly and Heidi, which is an odd thing for the board chairman to do. John claimed that “law and school policy” prevented them from accelerating Charlotte, but refused to state what law and/or policy he was talking about, and where it/they could be found. As the exhaustive evidence I provided first to the Treus and then in an email to the Board makes very clear, there is no law and no policy found anywhere that prevented WVA from accelerating Charlotte. I have uploaded that evidence, along with a summary explaining the content of each file, to a Google Drive at https://bit.ly/4bLf3GN; inside the folder “Charlotte”, see the document summary.pdf if you are interested.
In January, we were told to bring Charlotte into school to take a MobyMax assessment that would last less than an hour. However, as it turned out, no one knew how to run the exam; Holly stated she had never done it before. After 5 ½ hours, the exam finally exited. During all that time, no one provided any instructions. My seven-year-old daughter was left to figure it all out on her own, often completely alone in the room, or else with one person present who knew nothing about the exam. When it exited, the screen said Charlotte passed at a 3rd grade level. However, the next day, Holly emailed to tell us that Charlotte didn’t pass. When we finally met in person with Heidi and Holly, more than 6 weeks after we first requested such a meeting, Heidi accused Charlotte and/or us of cheating, because some of the assessments we let her practice at home were mixed in with the assessments she was supposed to be taking for her placement exam; somehow much of the test she spent all that time taking was from the wrong sections in MobyMax, and the first 2 ½ hours of her testing were somehow lost entirely. Rather than acknowledge that someone should have run through the exam ahead of time, and actually proctored it for a seven-year-old child, Heidi instead suggested that Charlotte navigated herself to the wrong area, as if she were a seven-year-old computer hacker. Heidi adamantly refused to take any responsibility for the debacle; she actually laughed at the suggestion that she bore any fault. An audio recording of the entire meeting can be found at https://bit.ly/4bLf3GN, in the file Jan11Meeting.m4a inside the folder “Charlotte”.
In reality, the Treus intervened and obstructed us because they blamed my wife, who until recently served on the governing board, for “making up” teacher feedback and daring to present it to the Treus during the October board meeting. Bizarrely, my wife didn’t even collect the teacher feedback; two other board members did, and she simply printed it out for everyone’s convenience. Obviously, no one made up anything; Frank Oliverio and Trista King simply collected comments from teachers in the hope that providing feedback might improve the obvious dysfunction at the school. Nonetheless, the Treus repeatedly and baselessly insisted that my wife made up the feedback, and that was why they were ignoring it entirely. When he was asked what possible motive my wife would have for doing that, John stated in front of at least two witnesses that it was because my wife was angry that our then-15-year-old daughter, Ella, was repeatedly getting dress coded by Heidi for dressing “like a slut”. (Editor’s note: this statement was made by John, not Heidi, and was said to Roy Boggess and Kenney Hite, who were still VPs at the time).
On a related note, before the start of the school year, Heidi told Ella in front of me and my wife that it was Ella’s responsibility to cover up “extra” because she’s so pretty and would therefore “drive those poor 8th grade boys crazy”, so she needed to consider how her appearance “could be a distraction”. Heidi subsequently harassed Ella over uniform infractions, even when other staff members spoke up to say Ella was fully in compliance with the dress code. After the October board meeting where the Treus became so enraged at my wife for absolutely no reason, Heidi’s harassment of Ella intensified significantly. Roughly two weeks ago, Heidi was so out of control while screaming and jabbing her finger in Ella’s face that, according to Ella, it brought Holly to tears; after Heidi stormed away, Ella stated the obvious – that it was wrong for Heidi to treat students that way – and Holly simply said (through tears) “I’m sorry, but she’s my boss”.
This Wednesday, after my son Liam had already started at Suncrest, Holly made it a point to reach out and tell them that Liam was suspended 10 days for “vandalism” because he threw some traffic cones into the basketball hoop outside, along with several other children. The kids at the school do this all the time, after which they just lower the hoop and remove the cones, then repeat the process. There is video of another student doing the exact same thing the day before, yet he received no punishment, nor should he, since no one before him was ever punished for this action either, let alone suspended for 10 days. This is another sad and obvious example of the Treus’ and Holly Honeycutt’s willingness to target someone’s child to “punish” the parents.
I hope everyone can appreciate that I desperately tried to address concerns with the administration directly, I only went to the board when that failed, and I’m only providing this information directly to parents now that John has essentially blown up the board and recreated it in his own image. I asked for a meeting with the administration in November, but I wasn’t given one until mid-January after they left my seven-year-old essentially alone to figure out a test for 5 ½ hours, at which point Heidi refused to accept any responsibility or to even administer the correct assessment. I asked to speak to the board at the January meeting and was granted a five-minute “public delegation”, but then John canceled the meeting, shortened my time to two minutes at the February meeting for no reason, and then refused to even allow me to have that time, despite being reminded and asked to by a rightful majority of the board to allow me to speak. I therefore consider this email to be my public delegation.
Just like every other parent you’ve heard from, I’m obviously a supporter of school choice or I wouldn’t have sent my kids to WVA. I am still a supporter of WVA, if only the Treus can be removed. Up until this point, I have tried so hard to address these issues without impacting WVA’s reputation, in the hopes that WVA might then recover and thrive once the Treus are gone. However, it is now clear that the Treus will never willingly step away, as they place their desire for absolute rule above the welfare or even the survival of the school. I am simply unwilling to wait for the long but inevitable process of their removal by the Charter School Board or another governing body to play out, so after one last egregious abuse of power by John at the board meeting last Thursday, I made the difficult decision to remove my other two children from WVA on Friday.
Voices of West Virginia Academy 
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