Parents, Teachers Seek Options At Charter School Fair | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dan Way, who is an associate editor for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

CJ Photo by Dan Way
Kamala Massey of Raleigh discusses charter school options with staff from Casa Esperanza Montessori
    RALEIGH     Her son has yet to turn 3, but Kamala Massey of Raleigh already is exploring alternatives to traditional public schools as she determines what's in his best educational interest.

    "I'm looking at all options" including charter, magnet, and private schools, Massey said Monday night during a school choice fair featuring 20 charter schools and academies, sponsored by the North Carolina Public Charter School Association at the Holiday Inn Crabtree.

    "I think every parent regardless of education [or] income, should have choice for their children, and so I think this is great as far as introducing them to options that are available to them," Massey said.

    "I don't think it's a matter of saying public schools are inadequate or anything like that," she said. "I just think it's just adding to the choices that you have in life, and it's something that's going to affect your child."

    The event was one of many being held in North Carolina in observance of National School Choice Week, Jan. 25-31.

    Another will be held at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Raleigh City Club sponsored by the John Locke Foundation in partnership with Choice Media, Inc. (Registration information here.)

    Award-winning education filmmaker and Choice Media Executive Director Bob Bowdon and John Locke Foundation Director of Education Outreach Lindalyn Kakadelis will moderate a discussion panel of experts.

    Panelists will be state Rep. Paul Stam, R-Wake; Michael Fedewa, superintendent of schools for the Raleigh Diocese; Jeannie Metcalf, vice chairwoman of Winston Salem/Forsyth County schools; Bryan Setser, chairman of Board for Connections Academy Virtual School; and Doug Haynes, CEO of Rocky Mount Prep Charter School, and chairman of the Board for the North Carolina Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Bowdon's 2014 documentary short "The Ticket: The Many Faces of School Choice," will be shown.

    At Monday's event, Neha Patel of Raleigh was seeking information for her 13-year-old son, who is now attending a technology-focused middle school, Triangle Math and Science Academy.

    Parents having choices is "what molds the child going forward. Public schools are not good for everybody," Patel said. Charters can provide "the attention, the focus, the one-on-one time" traditional schools cannot. The student-teacher ratio at her son's middle schools is 20-to-1 compared with 35-to-1 in the traditional public school in which he was zoned.

    Amanda Mount of Raleigh was at the school choice fair looking for a job. A teacher who has taught in China and the United States, she said her experience in a traditional public school was difficult.

    "When I first started working in public school I noticed there was a lot of stress just getting the kids through the grade, passing them along without even checking to see if they understand it," Mount said.

    "As a first-year teacher I didn't feel like I had any professional development help, any teachers that were going through the same thing as I was," she said. "I just felt very alone. And the principal was more worried about their scores and more worried about everything that was going on outside of what the kids were learning."

    Education should be about helping students experience life, "not just shoving it down their throats," Mount said, and charter schools are in the best position to give a more global education.

    Sam Coronado, assistant head of school at Casa Esperanza Montessori charter school, said the Raleigh-based school of 483 students is 50 percent white, 30 percent Hispanic, and the remainder African-American and Asian. Students enroll into an immersion program to learn to read and write in Spanish, or a less demanding program in which they learn some Spanish and Hispanic culture.

    He said the school serves "special needs populations that are not generally met in the public school system."

    "It's difficult in terms of making it financially sustainable, however, not impossible. That's the main hurdle I find" in running a charter school, Coronado said. "We as an option offer great opportunities ... but many [schools] just don't make it financially" because of disparities in funding with traditional schools.

    "We've been putting off for several years talking about finances because of the revenue challenges the state seems to have, and certainly teacher pay being the No. 1 thing folks talk about," said Eddie Goodall, executive director of the North Carolina Public Charter Schools Association.

    "But we're going to talk about charter schools this year" with state lawmakers, Goodall said.

    "We're 4 or 5 percent of the public schools right now. We've got to come back to the issue of having more equitable local funding of money," he said. "We've got to come back to the issue of sharing lottery money, and some smaller adjustments to move some of the regulation back that's been creeping up on charters and causing their small staffs to spend an inordinate amount of time on administrative work when they could be teaching kids."

    Sidney Reynolds, a consultant for Healthy Start Academy, the state's first public charter school, a K-8 program in Durham, said the school is proof that charters are not about white flight from traditional public schools.

    Its annual enrollment of 360 to 400 inner-city students is about 97 percent free and reduced lunch, a barometer of poverty, with about the same percentage of African-American students. The rest are Latino.

    Many of the students transfer from traditional schools with very low end-of-grade test scores, and might require two to four years to bring them up to grade level. Reynolds said lawmakers and educators should consider measuring schools in that situation by how well student performance increases year-over-year instead of by a standard performance composite score for the whole school.

    It also would be helpful to offer more flexibility with the Common Core curriculum for its students who do not perform well on standardized tests, she said.

    Most charter schools "would share the passion for pay-for-performance" for teachers, Reynolds said. "I think that needs to be thought through carefully and well" so that the best teachers are rewarded and retained.
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