Moving, growing in Dayton
Oakmont Education’s Liberty High School, a dropout recovery school in Dayton, is looking to move and expand into new space in time for the start of the 2024-2025 school year. The City of Dayton currently owns the property and the work to get it into the hands of the school and make it hammer-and-shovel ready is underway now. Good luck to all!
Mark your calendar
In Athens, the team working to open a new charter school in the city announced this week that it had received charter approval from the Ohio Department of Education. Southeast Ohio Classical Academy Board Chair Kimberly Vandlen told the Athens Messenger that the early approval—the school is not scheduled to open until fall of 2024—will allow them to jumpstart other important preparations. “Since we have checked this major milestone off of our list early,” she said, “our team will be freed up to get to work on other things like searching for a principal, fundraising, and solidifying building plans.”
Check your mailbox
This week, Columbus City Schools administration told reporters that new bus routing information—to take effect when school resumes in January after the holiday break—is being mailed to the homes of resident students who use district transportation to get to school. Interestingly, we learn in this Dispatch coverage that more than 14,100 charter and nonpublic school students are transported daily, a number that has not been well-publicized in the past. Here’s hoping they and their district-attending peers receive more reliable service under the new plans.
The view from West Virginia
An application was recently approved by West Virginia’s Professional Charter School Board to open a new school focused on nursing education next fall. Workforce Initiatives for Nursing, or WIN, Academy will be located in South Charleston—partnered with BridgeValley Community and Technical College—and will accept up to 120 rising juniors and seniors, with a goal of all students completing the first year of an associate degree program in registered nursing concurrent with their senior year of high school.
Rebuttal
The Fordham Institute’s David Griffith recently published a point-by-point rebuttal of a National Education Policy Center (NEPC) brief which had laid out four “core goals of American education policy” and attempted to show how the existence and operation of charter schools “undermined” them. While the NEPC chose a new way in which to air them, the anti-charter canards upon which they were based are old, familiar, and only loosely supported with facts. Griffith’s responses will be familiar to charter supporters but, as always, are worth a read.
Looking back on the Year of School Choice
As the calendar nears its end for 2022, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is looking back on the many highlights of state legislative work for charter schools all across the country. Coverage includes some important authorizing and accountability changes here in Ohio. You can check out the full wrap up here.
*****
Did you know you can have every edition of the Ohio Charter News Weekly sent directly to your Inbox? Subscribe by clicking here.
