Dear Proud Parents,
During the next month the Springfield Township School Board will be considering the application submitted by The Whole Life Charter School. I, along with my founding team, submitted this charter application with the intent of providing a highly individualized educational program to children who might find more success in school if the program could be balanced to accommodate their unique learning modalities. I am grateful to Elana Solomon, one of the administrators of this Facebook page, for her support of our school and for allowing us to speak with you directly about the educational option we are hoping to offer you.
Here are some basic facts about us. The Whole Life Charter School is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We are not associated with any for profit agency. We applied for a charter from the Springfield Township School District in 2006 and were granted a charter by the school board to operate a public high school in early 2007. That same month we lost our building and, in time, our charter. After much consideration, we reworked our design, found a wonderful new building, and are re-applying as a 4-12. The development of this school has been an eight-year process requiring thousands of hours of work and over $100,000 in grant money.
There were many reasons for initiating this goal of creating the Whole Life Charter School, none of them having to do with profit. If our motive was profit we would have given up after four years rather than continuing without virtually any reward or compensation for eight.
The first and still most overarching reason is the genuine desire to help children who desperately need the specialized education our school will provide but whose parents simply can't afford it. For many children, that help will cost nearly $30,000 yearly in tuition fees, not including additional fees for tutors and therapists. We hear from frustrated parents every day who tell us of children dropping out, children losing their sense of worth and esteem, children who are suffering anxiety and depression and are only in the third grade, children being bullied or attacked because they are a "little different," children whose parents have chosen to home school them as a last resort or remortgage their homes to send them to the specialized schools referred to above, and children whose parents have had to hire lawyers to get necessary accommodations from an unwilling school district every year for several years. We hear these stories from parents in every school district including Springfield Township.
Our next priority was to create a great school that offered a highly rigorous, exciting, even fun, education to children who might prefer a more experiential approach to learning than a traditional public school offers. As a piece of this, we challenged ourselves to answer the present educational milieu hysterical with high-stakes testing by finding programs proven to produce proficient test takers without a heavy reliance on drilling, excessive homework, or a focus narrowed to reading and math. (Students in charter schools take the same high-stakes tests as district-managed public schools. Unlike a district managed public school, however, a charter school can be shut down if it fails to meet the same standards as are required of any traditional public school. Charter schools do have the freedom to meet these standards using educational approaches other than those used in district-run public schools.)
To design our school, we assembled a project-based, hands-on teaching strategy by drawing on several successful school models with proven track records. The schools we chose to emulate also satisfied the requirements of our list. We also incorporated an established program called MicroSociety wherein our 4-8th graders will work part of each school day building and maintaining a fully functioning economy. MicroSociety is deep experiential learning at its best. The program naturally engages all learning styles. In their living economy our students will build real businesses for which they will devise products and services. They will learn how to price their products and services so that their businesses stay afloat. They will hire workers (classmates) and negotiate wages. They'll learn to balance their account sheets and calculate sales tax. They will develop a monetary system, establish tax rates, and create a student-run bank. They will determine how much money to print to keep their economy running. An elected governing body will write a constitution and negotiate amendments to it as the economy changes and grows. They will form political parties, hold debates and vote for their leaders. They will hold court, debate guilt or innocence and determine appropriate penalties for offenders. The list of activities is endless, and each activity is tied to the academics they will be discussing in class and learning from additional web-delivered curricula. The best part is that learning math no longer becomes about getting an A on the next test, it becomes about how Hannah and Jonnie's muffin baking business is going to survive. Social Studies becomes tangible as children use the Constitution or British Parliament as references towards the development of their own governing and judicial systems. There is so much more to this exciting program. You can down the MicroSociety Brochure right here.
Our third priority is for our teachers. We want to help our teachers develop into the most highly skilled professional educators they can be, so that we have an extraordinary faculty available to our students. To enable this, our teachers will meet every morning before the children arrive to exchange ideas, share practices that led them to successful outcomes, share new-found resources, brainstorm, and plan interdisciplinary classes. They will also teach in teams so that they can learn from each other and offer support to their teaching partners when needed. Federal law requires all of our teachers to be highly qualified. All of our school's teachers will have PA certification.
Our hope is that all Springfield Township parents see the Whole Life Charter School as an educational opportunity that expands every child's educational options in this district. If not for your child, consider the importance this school will have to your neighbor's children for whom we originally designed it and for whom this school would be an answer to their parent's prayer.
Please take a moment and help us help these kids and all kids by signing our petition to the school board asking them to, once again, authorize the Whole Life Charter School. The link is http://
If you would like to learn more about our application, the school's design, funding, or anything at all, don't hesitate to post any question you have. We will practice complete transparency with the Springfield Township community now and once we are established.
Thank you for your consideration,
Gary Sobolow
