This past February I was invited to attend a meeting organized by local parents who were interested in starting a charter school for the area around Swain County. I was hesitant. As a student and a teacher, I have always valued public education and indeed believe it is crucial to the empowerment of all individuals and to the continuation of a democratic society. I know how tight state budgets can be and how difficult it is for public schools to do their jobs well. I grouped charter schools with plans to give vouchers to private schools and saw both as ways to take funding from the already suffering public schools and from the kids who need it.

What I discovered was that I had a lot to learn about charter schools. I learned that charter schools are public schools and that the elitism I feared was groundless.

I don’t fault Dawn Gilchrest-Young, a woman I much admire, for the assumptions she made about charter schools in her column on Oct. 3; I made them too. But when I decided to participate in the application process that will hopefully grant the Mountain Discovery Charter School a charter to open a new school, I did so knowing that I wasn’t doing it just for my daughter Ayden or for the children of my friends. I was doing it to enhance and reform the education of all the children in the area.

Dawn’s argument asserts that “... the continuation of their charter is determined by the success of their school, and that includes test results. In order to survive, they must take students with academic strengths, and students whose parents have the flexibility, energy, and economic resources to be involved in school events during typical working hours, since, by definition, charter schools require direct parental involvement.”

This statement suggests that charter schools have the ability to pick and choose which students (and parents) will be most beneficial to the school. However, charter school legislation ensures that, even if the founders of this school would want to practice this type of elitism, which we do not, this method of inclusion and exclusion is impossible.

Charter schools cannot discriminate among the children who want to attend. In fact, though I have worked with the charter school throughout the application process, my daughter would have no greater chance of attending the school than any other child. Legislation mandates that the enrollment procedure is done by lottery to guarantee the fairness and equality that distinguish all public schools. The only children who would have priority would be children of the school’s teachers and siblings of students who are already enrolled in the school. Mountain Discovery will operate with the guiding belief that all children have a natural ability to learn and that all children have the ability to do well on tests.

Similarly, though charter schools desire and need parental involvement to meet success, they cannot require it. Mountain Discovery Charter School intends to have parents sign a “good faith” contract that parents will volunteer eight hours of service per semester, but this contribution could be made in a variety of ways — from helping in classrooms to landscaping to fund raising. Volunteer efforts would not discriminate against parents who have to work during the traditional school day, and neither could a student be dismissed from the school because a parent was unable to fulfill his or her service time. The contract merely indicates what the school would hope to expect from parents as a minimum of involvement in the children’s education.

Though critics are correct in stating that Mountain Discovery cannot serve all the children of Swain County (The school’s maximum enrollment the first year will be 144 students in grades K-6. The school plans to grow around 10 percent per year, adding grades 7 and 8 in consecutive years, and capping the school at around 230 students.), they are wrong to claim that this points to the school’s elitism. Mountain Discovery has no desire to replace the existing school system; it simply wants to supplement it by providing an alternative. The enrollment numbers reflect a middle ground; the school is big enough so that it isn’t exclusive and can accept students from diverse backgrounds and small enough to provide the envisioned educational some in the local school system feel that charter schools are necessary only when there are “enormous flaws” in the current schools and that perhaps Mountain Discovery is insinuating by its application that the current local schools are unsuccessful in what they do, I know this is not the case. I know a number of teachers in the Swain and Cherokee public schools, and I know them to be incredible educators, devoted tirelessly and unselfishly to their jobs despite low salaries and the demands that teaching makes on their personal lives. While pursuing a teaching certificate at Western Carolina University, I regularly observed Kathy Proctor’s eighth-grade language arts class, and I know what a wonderful job these teachers do. But I also know the difficulties placed upon these teachers by class periods, end-of-year tests, and large class sizes. I know that a traditional school structure doesn’t offer the best environment for all children.

Charter School legislation was created to encourage reform in education and performance-based accountability. The premise behind charter schools goes something like this: a spirit of healthy competition encourages excellence and there is value in trying something new. In this sense, I truly believe that an educational alternative will, by its very existence, improve the education of all children in the area. In a Sept. 21 press release, Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, states, “The data shows conclusively that charter schools have made an indelible mark on education ... charter schools are working, parents are happy with them, traditional school districts have been propelled to make improvements and children are thriving in a charter school setting. These findings and reports are so definitive they leave little room for those that say charter schools hurt public education.”

Furthermore, Mountain Discovery Charter School has the flexibility to create the school within a unique framework, that of Expeditionary Learning, which structures its curriculum around hands-on “expeditions” and could benefit children who are active or even labeled as “hyperactive” or “ADD” in traditional classroom settings. Because of its small school size, Mountain Discovery also hopes to incorporate other innovations in education such as learning across grade levels, flexible blocks of time for instruction, and second language and music lessons beginning as early as kindergarten. I believe that Mountain Discovery can serve as a sort of test-pilot for innovations in education, and that through a friendly collaboration with the local school system, that we can work together to improve every child’s education.

It is true that the local school systems will have to change their budgets if students do move from the existing schools to the charter school. No one wants to see cuts to the existing schools, but as I have explained above, this is not elitist, nor is it “cruel.” The charter school will get no more money than the local school system per child from the state and federal government; there is no charter school fairy godmother who will give us more money simply because we are a charter school. The charter school will also work to meet the financial needs of a school. Because the state does not provide additional money for a charter school to secure a location, the charter school will actively pursue grants, donations, and other forms of fundraising from the private sector. Essentially, the charter school will bring more money into the local area for educational purposes. The charter school’s money will not go into private schools, as the voucher programs would have it. The taxpayer’s money instead goes into another choice for public education, and parents can, of course, still choose to send their children to the existing public schools. But if they decide that they want an alternative public education, it is their choice of spending their tax dollars.

The impact of the charter school will likely be much less than anticipated by the local school board. Though $600,000 would go to the charter school from Swain’s budget, that is actually only 8.5 percent of the existing $6.5 million from state and federal appropriation to Swain County for grades K-8.
Furthermore, providing something of a middle ground between non-traditional education and existing public schools, Mountain Discovery will likely pull a number of its students from the families now home schooling their children. Bringing these students into the public school system will only bring more state and federal funds into the area. Also, while Mountain Discovery plans to be located in Swain County, it plans to draw its students from Swain, Jackson, Graham, and the Qualla Boundary by finding a central location. By drawing from five elementary schools, a private school, and home-schooled children, the charter school should not be felt as a devastating blow to any school.

Mountain Discovery Charter School wants to work with the existing local school systems, not against them. If the local school systems will work with the school, it can combine its resources to fund programs such as busing, professional development or after school programs, and it would like to do so. But I do object to the fear of “rocking the boat” that currently predominates the existing systems and which ultimately threatens the successful education of the children of this area. I believe that Mountain Discovery has the potential to effect change in a positive way for the entire community. I believe that a charter school will improve the education of all children in Swain County and give parents another option. I believe that Mountain Discovery Charter School can help that happen.

(Esther Godfrey lives in Swain County and is pursuing a graduate degree at theUniversity of Tennessee.)

 

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