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The ABC’s of charter schools
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JAN. 31 & FEB. 1 • $15 Advance $20 day of Show
At The Holiday Inn Airport
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St. Bridget’s Church in the Northeast section of the city is the future home of PUC Achieve Charter School. PUC plans to open nine more schools in Rochester. PHOTO BY MARK CHAMBERLIN
You could call 2013 the year of the charter school in Rochester. Charters have been operating in the city for years, of course, but attention intensified last year and charter chatter was everywhere. Three new charters were approved to open, with several more in the pipeline. Rochester schools superintendent Bolgen Vargas repeatedly lamented the loss of students and district resources to charter schools. And Lovely Warren made education — specifically, her desire to bring more charters to Rochester — the centerpiece of her winning mayoral campaign. Given that interest in charters continues to grow, you may wonder how they get approved. And if big charter school organizations have an advantage over the homegrown mom and pop applicants, as some people say they do? And what happened to the original intent of charter schools: to discover new teaching methods and then apply those techniques in traditional public schools? Charters in New York are approved by the State University of New York or the State Education Department. The legislation, which passed in 1998, also gave the chancellor of education in New York City the authority to approve charters there. But most applications go through SUNY or the SED, and in both cases, the process is rigorous, costly, and time-consuming. And each application undergoes multiple stages of review — a process not unlike applying to a top-tier university or being a contestant on the Food Channel’s “Chopped.” “Only 16 percent of first time [SUNY] applicants get approved,” says Catherine Kramer, SUNY’s director of charter school information. Odds improve for applicants 6 CITY
JANUARY 15-21, 2014
who resubmit their proposals after they’ve addressed reviewers’ concerns, she says. But there are no guarantees. John Bliss, co-founder of Urban Choice Charter School in Rochester and a former teacher in the city school district, learned this firsthand. His application for a new charter, One Roof Charter School, was rejected by SUNY. The rejection letter included a lengthy list of reviewers’ concerns and ended with a politely-worded paragraph saying that even if the issues are addressed, approval still isn’t guaranteed. Bliss says that although the process is supposed to be transparent, it isn’t. And he says there’s no consistent formula for getting an application approved. The process is also long and drawn out, taking anywhere from 18 to 36 months, and requires significant financial resources. A charter proposed by David Silver and Donna Cozine of Rochester was one of six applications approved by the State Education Department last year. And that was on the second submission. “We applied to SUNY first, and then we withdrew it and reapplied to continues on page 8