Stories featured in Ohio Charter News Weekly may require a paid subscription to read in full.
So much good
There’s a lot of great things one could focus on in this national story which made the rounds last week. A bright young man getting good pay for on-the-job experience right out of college, the success of Teach for America bringing energetic new recruits into the field, a new teacher enthused about working with special needs students, and the successful future this TFA member is able to build for himself. But for our purposes, let’s celebrate the fact that this bright ball of energy is serving his TFA tenure—with verve and exuberance, it seems—in a charter school here in Columbus. Great stuff.
Two on the grow
We’ve noted before that the Toledo School for the Arts has recently increased its size, capacity, and program offerings. In this piece, we see what this really means for students, faculty, and the community. And the news is good. Meanwhile, Summit Academy in Lorain is getting itself set for growth in the near future. The charter school, which primarily serves students on the autism spectrum or with attention deficits, has consolidated two separate buildings into one and is busily renovating and adding onto that building as the current K-8 format expands to add high school grades in the fall. Wishing them all the best.
Thanks, moms
Kudos to San Antonio Charter Moms, an organization that offers multiple important resources to other area families looking to find the right educational fit for their children. These include an online school choice guide, a timeline feature that means no one misses an application deadline, online discussion groups, and their regular School Discovery Day events. The next one of those is January 25, held at an awesome-looking children’s museum and featuring representatives from dozens of schools ready to meet and talk with interested folks about all their schools have to offer. Couldn’t ask for more, could you? Further information about the group’s great work can be found here.
An advanced state
In 2023, Idaho created both a revolving loan fund to help jumpstart the creation of new charter schools and a credit enhancement plan to allow established charters to get cheaper loans for facility construction and expansion. This week, Matthew Joseph, senior policy adviser at ExcelinEd, laid out for members of the Idaho House Education Committee how fruitful those efforts have been. The two financing tools, he said, cost the state nothing on an ongoing basis and they’ve saved $113 million for the schools who’ve used them, meaning that more seats have been created for growing student populations than could have been added without them and that the savings realized have been reinvested into instruction. “I work in states all over the country that are not nearly as advanced as Idaho is,” he said.
Funding virtual school students
Ty Babinski, president of the Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families, published an op-ed in Wisconsin Politics this week laying out the history, struggles, and growth of the virtual charter school movement in his state. In order to ensure student engagement, foster social skills in a digital environment, and provide equitable access to technology for the burgeoning sector, he says, virtual students need more equitable funding. The current state formula, he writes, shortchanges virtual school students, and even singles them out “by restricting their access to extracurricular activities.” He provides a prescription to fix these ills and urges the state legislature to bring them to fruition.
*****
Did you know you can have every edition of the Ohio Charter News Weekly sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
