6/14/98
A school charter, says Johnathan Williams of Los Angeles, ``is a license to dream.'' 
     His dream-made-reality is The Accelerated School in South Central L.A. He and a co-founder opened it in September 1994 as a K-6 school holding classes in a church. Now they have 900 children on the waiting list, and they're raised $10 million to move into a 150,000-square-foot building, so they can expand through the 12th grade. 
     Williams and other founders of urban charter schools were in Denver recently, and Executive Director Jim Griffin of the Colorado League of Charter Schools recruited them for a how-we-did-it session. 
     It was the first public event of the league's new ``at-risk initiative,'' intended to provide technical assistance and advocacy for traditionally underserved communities. 
     From the beginning, the charter-school movement has been committed to serving at-risk students, Griffin said, but that hasn't been the primary focus of the typical charter school in Colorado. 
     ``It's the same communities that have the most disadvantaged students,'' he said, ``that have the most trouble accessing the charter schools.'' 
     Yvonne Chan is the principal of Vaughn Street Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima, Calif., a gritty neighborhood in the East San Fernando Valley. Chan ticked off Vaughn Street's statistics; 1,200 children K-5, 100 percent free lunch, 95 percent Hispanic, 75 percent limited-English-proficient, all in a facility built for 700. 
     The district saved computer space, she said sardonically, because test scores were in single digits. 
     Vaughn operated year-round, and when it opened July 1 in its first year as a charter school the district said there'd be no money until fall. Chan mortgaged her house to meet the payroll. 
     But also in its first year as a charter, Vaughn ran a $1.2 million surplus. Chan bought adjoining land to build more classroom space, and when the musical chairs ended, increased the school year to 200 days from 163. 
     Now test scores are 11 points above the district average, and Vaughn Street has $4 million to help little schools. 
     ``We're going to start 10 charters in our neighborhood,'' she said. 
     Richard Farias of Houston leads the Raul Yzaguirre School for Success, intended to prepare high-risk middle school students for high school. 
     The school has an extended-day program, from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and because they provide buses for everyone, they have a 98 percent attendance rate. Parents sign a contract committing them to 36 hours of school service every year. 
     The first year, a few parents didn't follow through. He hated to do it, Farias said, but he put their children at the bottom of the list for admission the following year. 
     I won't have room to tell all these stories (though Griffin has a videotape you can ask for), but I hope you can see what they have in common; the extraordinary and contagious vision of their leaders. 
     ``We hire staff that buy in,'' said William Pierce, founder of Right Step Academy in Minneapolis. 
     ``Our students and our parents have great ownership,'' said KarLa Gray Boynton, principal and founder of Sierra Leone Academy in Detroit. 
     And Joe Lucente, principal of Fenton Avenue Charter School in Lake View Terrace, Calif., just down the road from Vaughn Street, tells of the teacher who fell down a flight of steps one Friday and broke her ankle. 
     Monday morning she was ready for class. 
     ``Nothing wrong with me, I can teach from a wheelchair,'' she told Lucente. ``I don't want our rates to go up.'' 
     Currently Chan and Lucente get 95 percent of the money the state gives their districts. Colorado Gov. Roy Romer vetoed a bill that would have guaranteed Colorado charter schools no less. But a new charter law goes into effect in California next year. It raises the cap on the number of charter schools, provides that they will get their funds direct from the state and allows groups that want a charter to apply to the county or state if their district turns them down. 
     The California legislature hurried to put together the bill rather than face an initiative that would have given charter schools even more. 
     Griffin said Thursday he's encouraged that Denver school officials have expressed interest in seeing the entire presentation. 
     Surely there are more men and women here in Denver who can make good use of a license to dream.