State officials said Thursday that they will take the unprecedented step of shutting down a charter school where they say course work has persistently fallen short of state graduation requirements.

The closure of BlueSky Online School would be the first time that the Minnesota Department of Education has stepped in directly to shutter a charter school, acting against the judgment of the school's authorizer.

"At the end of the day, this is about setting standards, expecting quality and looking for real accountability from any public school," said Charlene Briner, a spokeswoman for the Education Department.

In letters sent Thursday to the school, department officials said that they will start the process of terminating BlueSky's contract with the nonprofit organization that oversees it, effectively closing the school.

The school, which has about 720 students statewide in grades 7-12, will remain open for now, Briner said.

"I would not expect that it would be closed prior to the end of the school year," she said. "I would not anticipate that it would be open this fall."

After reviewing student transcripts, lesson plans and other data, state officials say that BlueSky is still violating the law by graduating students who did not meet state requirements, particularly in math and social studies.

BlueSky officials, who insist that the school is following the law, have already taken steps to fight closure. School spokesman Dan Cook said they were disappointed but not surprised by Thursday's notice, which came after a two-year string of state audits and warnings.

Last month, department officials asked Novation Education Opportunities, BlueSky's authorizer, to say whether it would cut ties with the school -- or said they would take action themselves.

Novation declined, saying that the results of its own investigation did not match the state's. The organization shared its findings with the Education Department, but state officials found the information unpersuasive.

"They did not provide compelling evidence that indicated that our review was inaccurate or incomplete," Briner said.

Department officials said their analysis of BlueSky lesson plans showed that algebra and American Government courses offered at the school fall short.

"In most cases, some parts of the benchmarks were not addressed. In other cases, the lessons lacked sufficient rigor for the high school level," they said in one of Thursday's letters.

They said they believe that most of the school's 10 winter graduates, who got their diplomas in February, did not meet state requirements.

On transcripts, the main problem with math "is that BlueSky students were not given opportunities to learn the mathematics content expected of a high school student," the state said. "Most BlueSky graduates took no algebra beyond algebra I." In social studies, some students, "although they earned the required overall number of social studies credits ... failed to take sufficient course work to complete all the economics and government and citizenship standards."

BlueSky officials say the state is misinterpreting lesson plans and student transcripts. "We're still very confident and very convinced that they are not looking at our information properly," Cook said.

Regulation has intensified

Since Minnesota became the first state to pass a charter school law in 1991, several dozen charter schools have closed because of problems ranging from low enrollment to poor academic performance or governance, Briner said.

Some schools have been forcibly shut down by their authorizers -- school districts, nonprofits or colleges that are paired with each school to keep tabs on finances and student achievement. BlueSky's closure by the education chief would be a first, Briner said.

The state's decision to close BlueSky comes two years after legislators overhauled a state law regulating Minnesota's charter schools. Among other things, the new law aims to place more of the burden for oversight on authorizers, rather than the state.

"Respectful" of the relationship between authorizers and schools, state officials gave Novation a chance last month to act before intervening to shut down BlueSky, said David Hartman, acting supervisor of the department's charter schools center.

"Ultimately, this is a test to see whether or not [authorizers are] willing to follow through on what they were approved to do," he said at the time.

On Thursday, Briner declined to comment on whether the state believes Novation has fallen short of its responsibility to oversee BlueSky. She said, though, that the authorizer's decision not to end the school's contract is "a little difficult to understand, given the department's findings."

BlueSky has the right to a hearing before Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius, and Cook said the school plans to request one. Cook added that school officials are skeptical that Cassellius would be an impartial judge, although Briner said the commissioner has until now been "walled off" from the state's review of the school to ensure that she can reach a decision independently of department employees.

Cook said the school would prefer to argue its case before a judge. In documents filed this month, the school asked the Minnesota Court of Appeals to intervene in its dispute with the Education Department.

Sarah Lemagie • 952-882-9016