Original Research by School Decision on Diego Hills Central Public Charter District
Diego Hills Central Public Charter District no longer operates. Its sole school, Diego Hills Central Public Charter, closed permanently on June 30, 2024. The district itself remains as a legal entity, but it has no schools and enrolls no students.
The school that closed was a Learn4Life-affiliated charter serving kindergarten through twelfth grade, authorized by the Dehesa School District. Before closure, the student body was small, concentrated almost entirely in the high school grades, with the largest share of students identifying as Hispanic. The campus sat in San Diego County.
The closure came in a context worth understanding. The authorizing Dehesa School District was caught up in the statewide A3 charter fraud scandal, in which prosecutors alleged that participants, including Dehesa officials, enrolled fake students into an online charter network to collect state funding. The district later received substantial oversight fees from those schools, at one point making that revenue stream among its largest sources. In response, Dehesa overhauled its charter authorization and oversight procedures, creating requirements that went beyond state minimums. That governance shift shaped how Diego Hills Central and other charters it authorized were monitored.
State assessment data and a four-year graduation rate were not available in the reporting. The district's chronic absenteeism rate, recorded before the school closed, placed it in the lowest quartile among San Diego County districts, a pattern that may have reflected challenges the school was working through or reporting differences. Per-pupil spending was in the upper range for the county, higher than the median.
For any family that had considered this school or was enrolled when it closed, the next step is to identify an alternative. The Dehesa School District and the broader San Diego County landscape of public, charter, and private schools in the area would be the logical places to look.
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