NEWS
How D.C. shortchanges public charter school students [FOCUS, Eagle Academy PCS, Washington Latin PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
A new charter school for foster kids aims to provide stability [Monument Academy PCS and SEED PCS mentioned]
D.C. charter schools draw diverse group of students, report shows [Friendship Collegiate Academy PCS and SEED PCS mentioned]
How D.C. shortchanges public charter school students [FOCUS, Eagle Academy PCS, Washington Latin PCS and Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Times
By Eric McKinley King
May 17, 2015
By ignoring its own law, the District favors traditional public schools
As a parent, I believe in the original rallying cry for public charter schools in the District of Columbia — “parental choice.” Charters are publicly funded, but run independently of the traditional public school system; they were intended to extend choice to every parent regardless of income because, like the school system, charters are tuition-free public schools. But despite the government’s responsibility to fund the education of all its public school students fairly, the choices and voices of the 45 percent of parents who have selected charters in the District are being disrespected.
You might think that every child who attends public school in the District of Columbia would be treated equally, regardless of which school they attend. District law certainly says so.
The D.C. School Reform Act, which allowed charter schools to open in the District, says that every child at the same grade level or special education need should receive equal city funds, whether enrolled in a public charter or traditional public school. Nonetheless, in our nation’s capital, charters have been consistently funded with fewer city dollars than their peers, despite the letter and spirit of the law.
Recently, the District government filed a second motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of all D.C.’s charter schools by the D.C. Association for Chartered Public Schools, Eagle Academy Public Charter School and Washington Latin Public Charter School. The lawsuit seeks no damages for year-upon-year of past underfunding — simply equal funding with local taxpayer dollars going forward, for whatever public school students’ parents choose for their child.
Tragically, successive administrations have illegally underfunded District public charter school students by between $1,600 and $2,600 annually for the past eight years alone. D.C. Public Schools, the city-run school system, has received $770 million over and above what has been made available to charters, despite charters’ enrollment swelling to nearly half of the public school provision in the nation’s capital. Charter students have therefore missed out on nearly $400 million over the last eight years alone.
Just before the government filed its latest motion to dismiss the charter schools’ case, an amicus brief in defense of the charters’ legal action was filed. Signatories included the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Center for Education Reform and Friends of Choice in Urban Schools. But beyond the legal arguments, there is the scale of the damage done to children by the District government’s illegal behavior. The many children who benefited from the choice charters created should also be considered.
Some 78 percent of D.C.’s charter students are African-American, compared to 68 percent in D.C. Public Schools. And 12 percent of DCPS students, but 5 percent of charter students, are white. Four in five District charter students are growing up in homes where their household income makes them eligible for federal lunch subsidies — a higher share than their neighbors and siblings enrolled in public schools. An important factor in this is that charters commonly choose to locate in the communities which have been the most underserved educationally, and in other ways.
By providing choice, charters have brought new, higher-quality options for parents and children previously deprived of them. D.C. charter schools have an on-time high-school graduation rate that is 21 percentage points higher than the city-run school system. This enables many more charter students to be accepted to and graduate from college.
District charter students outperform their contemporaries in the traditional system on standardized reading and math tests. Nowhere is this more true than east of the Anacostia River, where poverty, unemployment and crime are highest. In D.C.’s Ward Seven and Ward Eight, District charter students outscore DCPS enrollees by 18 and 26 points, respectively, on citywide tests.
My son is a student at Friendship Public Charter School. Like most parents, when I was making my choice, I wanted the best school that suited his needs, and would prepare him for college. Friendship has three campuses rated Tier 1 — high performing — by the city’s charter board, one of a small group of such schools in the District. Its most established high school has a 92 percent on-time graduation rate, compared to DCPS’ 56 percent average.
I am not a lawyer. But as a father, I do know this: The government must obey its own law and fund charter students equally. Our voices and our choices for the education that is right for our children have been too long ignored by a government that lacks transparency, and hasn’t listened.
A new charter school for foster kids aims to provide stability [Monument Academy PCS and SEED PCS mentioned]
Greater Greater Washington
By Natalie Wexler
May 15, 2015
Monument Academy, an innovative charter boarding school designed to serve children in foster care, opens in DC in August. The school will try to provide the stable family environment kids in the foster system often lack.
The school will open with 40 fifth-graders, divided into two classes. It will add one grade a year through eighth grade and eventually serve 160 students, with hopes of expanding through high school. During the week, students will live in groups of about ten, along with two house parents, in a home-like setting on school grounds.
Some have criticized the charter sector for not doing enough to serve children who are at-risk, pointing to the fact that, as compared to the traditional public school sector, fewer charter schools have high concentrations of at-risk students. But Monument Academy, like a few other charters, is taking on the education of at-risk students as its core mission.
If it's successful, Monument could address the root causes of many of the difficulties schools with lots of at-risk students face: dysfunctional home environments and a lack of mental health services.
School co-founder and CEO Emily Bloomfield first conceived the idea for Monument after an incident within her own family. Relatives suddenly found themselves responsible for two grandchildren, aged five and six, both of whom had learning and emotional challenges. The grandparents were overwhelmed, and Bloomfield realized there was no institution that could help them.
She also began researching what generally happens to children in foster care and discovered that outcomes were "dismal." A three-state study showed that by age 24, only 6% of foster care alumni had a two- or four-year college degree, and nearly a quarter hadn't earned a high school diploma or GED. Nearly 40% had been homeless since leaving foster care.
Those figures roughly match the situation in DC, where the Children and Family Services Agency (CFSA) serves about 1,000 kids in foster care, along with another 2,000 receiving services in their homes. Bloomfield cites figures from 2012 showing that 65% of those in the foster care system here drop out of high school, and only 4% get a four-year degree.
Bloomfield has experience with education and charter schools, having served on the Santa Monica school board before moving from California to DC in 2007. In 2010, she began a four-year stint on the DC Public Charter School Board, the agency that authorizes charter schools here. Shortly after her term expired, Bloomfield submitted an application to found Monument Academy.
Family-style model
DC already has one charter boarding school, SEED, but Monument's model will be different. Rather than having kids live in dormitories as they do at SEED, Monument will have them live family-style, with house parents.
Unlike SEED, Monument is specifically targeting children who haven't had "the experience of consistency and stability," Bloomfield said. The school wants to provide them with that, along with the social-emotional and life skills that will ultimately enable them to live independently.
Children will stay at the school in four-bedroom apartments from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon, returning to their families or caregivers for the weekend. Every morning, students will prepare breakfast with their house parents, set a personal goal for the day, and engage in some physical activity.
After school and afternoon extracurricular activities, they'll return for dinner, followed by homework, communal activities, a reflection on the goal they set in the morning, and lights out at 9 p.m.
Preparing for students who have experienced trauma
Not all children at the school will be in the foster care system, but all will come from backgrounds of trauma and stress. In addition to providing each class of 20 students with two teachers and the half-time services of a special education teacher, Monument will employ three social workers for each grade level.
Supervising the social workers will be Dr. Melissa Smith, the school's director of well-being, who was in foster care herself as a child and has also been a foster parent. A child psychiatrist at Georgetown University Medical Center, Dr. Matthew Biel, will visit the school weekly to provide support for both students and faculty.
Monument will also try to engage the families or guardians of its students, visiting their homes and inviting them to the campus for family events. Families will also have regular contact with teachers and house parents when dropping children off at school on Sundays and picking them up on Fridays.
Bloomfield says the school is committed to not suspending or expelling students, an experience many children at Monument are likely to have had before. While extreme behavior might call for a transfer to a more therapeutic setting, in cases of run-of-the-mill defiance the school will use techniques like restorative justice to try to get at the behavior's underlying causes.
To plan for the school, Bloomfield and other Monument staff visited the Milton Hershey School in rural Pennsylvania, a free private boarding school for low-income children in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
The Hershey School, established in 1909 by the founder of the chocolate company, has an endowment of over $9 billion. Among its amenities are four swimming pools, an ice hockey rink, and an equestrian program.
Monument Academy won't have the resources to duplicate the entire Hershey experience. But the school is borrowing essential aspects of the model, including the house parent system, and Bloomfield says the staff here will make do with what they have.
"We don't need an ice rink," she says. "We have a rec center across the street. And we have all of Washington, DC."
More funding than the average charter
Still, the school will have more resources than the average DC charter. In addition to the usual allocation of about $12,000 per student, Monument will get about $25,000 to cover the costs of boarding, as does SEED.
Monument students are also likely to fall into the at-risk category, which triggers another $2,000 per pupil. And Bloomfield anticipates that at least half will qualify for special education funding, which can be as much as $30,000 per student.
Bloomfield says public funding will cover most of the school's costs, but she hopes to raise about $5 million to complete renovations and additions to the building, a former DC Public School building in Northeast DC.
The school has already enrolled about 30 students. They've been referred by the CFSA, school social workers, organizations that work with the homeless, and others in the community who knew good candidates.
Monument is attacking a daunting modern problem by reinventing an old institution: the orphanage. And it may be taking on an even greater challenge than the well-resourced Hershey School, which targets low-income students generally rather than at-risk ones and refuses admission to students with "serious behavioral problems."
It's too soon to know whether Monument's approach will work. But judging from the thought and planning that's going into launching the school, it stands a good chance of success.
D.C. charter schools draw diverse group of students, report shows [Friendship Collegiate Academy PCS and SEED PCS mentioned]
Watchdog.org
By Moriah Costa
May 15, 2015
When it comes to choosing charter schools, D.C. parents are willing to send their children across the city in search of the best fit.
About 48 percent of charter school students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade attend a school outside their home ward; 46 percent of students attend a school in a different neighborhood, according to a report from the D.C. Public Charter School Board.
The report also dispels the myth that students don’t go east of the Anacostia River to attend school.
More than 1,100 students living in other wards attend a school in Wards 7 and 8. More than a quarter of their students at Friendship Public Charter School – Collegiate Academy and SEED Public Charter School live in a different ward.
Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, said the report makes it clear parents are choosing charter schools based on quality.
“What struck me about this report wasn’t just that parents were moving from certain wards to more affluent wards but that there’s a migration on the reverse side, as well,” she said.
Rees said parents take into account things such as safety, size and school culture when deciding where to send their children.
The report looked at enrollment numbers and commuting times to determine choice trends in the city. For a number of students who attend charters, the commute is one to three miles, with some students traveling as far as five miles. In comparison, students who attend their neighborhood D.C. Public School travel less than a mile.
The areas with the highest percentage of students going to school outside their neighborhood were Wards 3 and 2, with 100 and 90 percent, respectively. Only one public charter school is in those two wards.
A study of New Orleans charter schools by Tulane University found that academics were just one factor parents consider when choosing a school. They also think about convenience, after-school programs and extracurricular activities.
About 44 percent of D.C. students attend a charter school.
Charter school demand has increased, with a 15 percent increase in the citywide open enrollment application. At the same time, the waiting list for charter schools increased by 18 percent, with demand for out-of-neighborhood traditional public schools increasing 25 percent.
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