South City Confidential

School Daze

The charter school is coming along exactly as planned (insert evil mustache-twirling maniacal laughs). A few weeks ago, we had our review for the first of two planning grants. This involved submitting the first incantation of our business plan, as well as an in-person interview where our four founding members defended said proposal in front of a group of people. It also involved me squeezing into “business attire” that I didn’t exactly try on before I bought it and consequently ended up feeling like Joan Holloway.

It was a leetle tight pretty much everywhere and the girls decided they wanted to be part of the interview, too, but luckily I had a modest cardigan to keep things classy. Whether it was my spectacular ability to resemble sausage casing or just the sheer awesomeness of both our plan and interview, we must have done something right, because South City Prep just got its first funding. 30K, y’all.

I’m thinking I should change my kickball at-bat song back to this (NSFW).

I was disappointed to find out that our grants don’t come as giant checks. Would it kill them to make a giant check?

Right now, we are really, really close to finishing the document we’ll submit to the Mayor’s Office, DESE, and for the second planning grant worth a cool $220K. This involves creating a budget, outlining our vision for the school, preliminary curriculum planning, picking methods of assessment, designing a professional development framework, and various other “big picture” ideas. Once that document is submitted, we’ll start putting that plan into action. We’ll spend part of our first grant visiting model urban charter schools in Chicago, Houston, and Boston. We’ll start looking for additional board members and a facility, establish relationships with community members, continue refining our curriculum, and start a marketing campaign to recruit both students and teachers. While we do that, our plan slowly quits being just that and starts being real, meaning we start hammering out the nitty gritty of schooling 200 tweens in a way that guarantees that every single last student graduates on time and heads towards college.

I’m scared fucking shitless.  I mean, thinking about it keeps me up at night, even though we won’t open for over a year. I keep having random, relatively-unimportant-for-where-we-are thoughts, like “Oh, all our kids have to get library cards.  And watches,” or “We need walkie-talkies.” It’s well and good to have a plan, but then we actually have to make it happen. I mean, think of all the things that have to happen to make our dream a successful reality.  We’ve got to find amazing teachers, they have to want to work their asses off, and we have to do everything we can to support them so they want to continue working at our school.. In addition to stuff like, oh, finding a building and getting it to be the environment we need for our kids, we’ve got to create and execute a curriculum that will get all kids on grade level in reading and math by the time they enter high school, plus accommodate special needs students, plus challenge gifted students, plus engaged disengaged students. That’s the bare minimum our curriculum must do. Plus, we’ve got to make it culturally relevant. Plus we have to train teachers to teach in a rigorous, culturally-relevant way. Plus, we have to teach critical thinking skills. And cooperation skills. And academic skills. And media literacy skills. We have to identify and purchase curriculum in the areas where it is appropriate. We have to find a food provider for breakfast and lunch. We have to identify and cultivate relationships with community groups that can help support our mission. We have to reach out to families to forget positive relationships before the school opens. We’ve got to recruit enough students to make the school fiscally viable. We have to figure out what kind of technology we need and how we’ll maintain it. We need to have focus groups with families to determine how our school can serve their children. We need to find a way to bring social service agencies into our school to provide services for our students, like vision testing, hearing testing, basic health care, and translation services for non-English speaking families. We have to expand our board. We have to fundraise. We have to create a long-term development plan.  We have to figure out an information management system. We have to figure out how to get kids to school on time. We have to plan bus routes. We have to plan for inclement weather. We have to figure out how many teachers we can afford and how big classes will be because of that. We have to order furniture. We have to pick uniforms and uniform suppliers. We have to figure out how students who can’t afford them will get uniforms. I mean, THE NEVERENDING LIST GOES ON and it gives me insomnia. Dude.

Guess I better get back to work.

KBO posted this article under education, life, St Louis, work on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 1:41 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.