In my last post on starting a charter school, I rather lengthily talked about writing the full application. The narrative section of the application is one of the most important pieces of the entire process. In New York State, there are information sessions set up for groups looking to submit applications. You can go here http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/documents/NovDecInfosessions.pdf to get the latest information on dates and times for the 2011-2012 cycle of applicants. It would be helpful to review the 2010 and 2011 cycles, which outline the process, and show you how many applicants started the process to how many applicants finished with a NYS Board of Regents approved charter. The guidelines in the kits are strict. Page overages or being under the required pages could end up costing you a spot further along in the process. If you are located outside of New York State (where I am working on our charter application), be sure to take time to review all of the specific guidelines provided by your authorizer.

And don’t forget about the Network of Independent Charter Schools Online Hotline. You can use it ANY TIME, free of charge, to ask questions specific to your charter application process!

After the application narrative is completed, you must spend some time thinking about what attachments you will include to support your narrative.  I’m going to walk through the attachments prepared in the New Dawn full application, which you can find here: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/psc/2011CSFullApplications.html. The first two attachments are standard for the full application. It includes a roster of all the individuals associated with your charter: board members, prospective employees, and community activists. The next is a certification statement that the lead applicant must sign. Those are the “easy” attachments to fill out.

The next attachment is the school schedule. This takes some careful consideration, because you have to think about the needs of your student body and what they will be taking over a period of time. For high schools, the challenge of what new entrants will need vs. a student who needs everything can be tricky. Elementary schools have less struggles with scheduling, just needing to account for scheduling with student/staff projections over the course of the charter. The school calendar must also be included, ensuring the number of days of instruction, along with holidays and school closures are listed over the course of the charter.

The Corporate By-Laws is a legal requirement. The By-laws of your charter establish the name of your school, the mission of the school and the purpose of the charter. This document outlines the roles and responsibilities of the board of trustees. This includes the roles of the board in relation to school governance. Code of Ethics is next.

The next section is dedicated to the proposed employees and board members of the school. With each role, a curriculum vitae is included, which supports the individual’s credentials. This is important, because it provides transparency to the authorizers on the abilities of the team to run a school. The New Dawn applicant group features many talented educators and administrators who have decades of experience with children, managing organizations and designing curriculum for the target cohort of students. Following the credentials of the members, attachments include a Statement of Assurances for each member, along with a signed Request for Information sheet, providing information required on the pages from the charter office. Essentially ,the request for information establishes no conflicts of interest from the board and prospective school employees.

The organization chart is another important component of the attachments. This gives you the opportunity to really think about the structure of accountability and reporting from the student level up to the board of trustees. These relationships establish the basis for school culture and relations within the community with teachers and parents. Following the organization chart is the description of each of the positions listed in the organizational chart. New Dawn chose to have an Executive Director and Principal, so that the Principal would be free to spend time in classrooms and foster a true learning community with feedback regularly taking place in the classroom. The last section is the budget. This shows the fiscal health of the organization and its capacity to serve its students over the life of the charter.

No matter what may be required by your specific Authorizer, these attachments are important, and I would recommend preparing all of them even if they are not legally required by your Authorizer. It shows how the instructional program of the school will be supported through the organization, board of trustees and budget. All of these components demonstrate the health of the organization and the ability to run the school throughout the length of its charter and through renewal to the next charter. Demonstrating sustainability is the key to getting your charter approved.

Next time…preparing for the meeting with your community board.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.

Lisa DiGaudio - Founding Board Member, New Dawn Charter School, NYC

In my last blog entry on "Starting a Charter School," I talked about writing the letter of intent. The letter of intent for New Dawn Charter School (the school I am helping to found) was due January 19, 2011. Shortly thereafter (February 2) the full 20-page prospectus was due. As I mentioned last week, from over 80 founding groups, just 36 were asked to turn in full applications. We were lucky to be one of those 36, and then one of the 22 invited for an interview with the selection committee. This was a tremendous source of anxiety as each deadline came and went. For all of us, opening a school of our own was our chance to prove how much we know about effective teaching practices and how students learn.

The Prospectus is an abbreviated version of the full application (download a copy of New Dawn's Prospectus). It was required to be just 20 pages in length and outline the overall structure of the school. The first part, our mission statement, describes what it is we are looking to accomplish when students enter the building.  This is New Dawn’s mission:

 New Dawn Charter High School will provide over-aged and under-credited students 15 - 21 years of age living in Sunset Park, including those who are English Language Learners and those with special needs, the opportunity to return to school and obtain a high school diploma through a rigorous NYSED standards-based education program. Within the framework of the education program, three programs will be offered: 1) Interventions for those with fewer than 11 credits, and for those with more than 11 or more credits: 2) Internships in the community and 3) College enrollment.

The next sections describe each element of the school, from the instructional program to finances. It is important in this brief outline of the school that we share the team’s ability to run a school. In two separate places we wrote small blurbs about ourselves that demonstrated why we were a strong founding group as compared to other applicants. One of the most important things that we had going for us, besides the majority of our team being affiliated with JVL Wildcat Academy Charter School, was our training in the School Improvement Engine through the Partnership for Innovation and Compensation for Charter Schools (PICCS). This extensive, YEARS-long training has made the bulk of the founding team capable of guiding the development of Individual Learning Plans (ILP’s), staff development through Peer Review and Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) as well as using the TERC data analysis tools. These elements are all significant evidence of how as a team we are not only in tune to student needs, but also in tune to faculty needs.

Throughout the prospectus, we each took sections to write as a base for the lead applicant, Sara Asmussen. My strengths lie specifically in instructional programming, using advisories, the workshop model and differentiating instruction. I had been trained on how to implement Individual Learning Plans (ILP’s) in the classroom, and piloted their use with my sixth grade ELA class (and yielded a 98% passing rate on the ELA exam for 2009). Other team members took the sections on student recruitment, due to their familiarity with recruiting similar students for Wildcat Academy. Scheduling and increasing the number of students enrolled from year to year are also important elements of the prospectus. The reviewers need to see that we can amend a school schedule to address the needs of a continuously increasing student population.

A strong budget, which balances from year to year indicates to the reviewers that the founding group understands how the state budgets and federal funding formulas work. This means that the budget doesn’t rely solely on state released funds and grants and has the capacity to generate income to accommodate the needs of the building. This is a tricky piece often, and truly showcases the handicaps that charter school operate under. Public schools are given buildings. Charter schools, if they are lucky, can get approved in sharing space with a district school to avoid the rent payment, but often the shared space issue is acrimonious. Rents are a huge issue for many mom and pop schools. You’re looking at over a million dollars per year in market share rent (in New York City and other major metropolitan areas) plus all of the things that go with it--building maintenance, utilities, etc. Without funding from outside sources, getting a building right from the start independent of district space is next to impossible. Also, with the economy the way it is, loan agencies and banks are not willing to extend lines of credit to a school to get a building, furniture, etc, unless they have been operating in some cases as long as three years.

Writing the prospectus really forces you to take all of the big ideas that your team developed and show evidence that these ideas are going to work. Student and staff recruitment plans, strong budgeting over a five-year period (the life of the charter in the case of New Dawn's application) and a solid instructional plan for the students, complete with plans for differentiation, staff development and capacity building are all factors that evaluators review when moving on to the full application phase. Thankfully, after much nail biting, New Dawn was approved to move to the full application, followed by the capacity interview. Coming up in my next blog entry: Preparing for the big application, meeting the guidelines put out by the authorizer, and then defending your views to the review panel.

Download a copy of New Dawn's Prospectus now >>

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This blog post is part of the Charter Notebook, sponsored by the Network of Independent Charter Schools, a project of the Center for Educational Innovation - Public Education Association.

The views expressed in Charter Notebook blogs represent the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association or the U.S. Department of Education.