I am pleased to announce the addition of a new member to the Whole Life Charter School founding team. Margaret J. Hickman, Ph.D. (Peggy) is an educator with a long list of academic accomplishments in the field of education. She received her Bachelor's of Science in Early Childhood Education in 1990 and followed that degree with two Master's degrees; one in Elementary/Bilingual Education and the Second in Educational Administration. Peggy's was most recently awarded a Ph.D. in MultiCultural Special Education in 2004. Peggy is currently an Associate Professor and Coordinator/Director of the Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership at Arcadia University.

A native of York, Pennsylvania, Peggy spent several years in the southwest where she was awarded certification in School Principalship, Professional Development and Appraisal Systems and in Instructional Leadership Training. In addition to published articles in  Learning Disabilities Quarterly, Exceptional Children, Teaching Exceptional Children, and The Reading Teacher, she co-chaired the Special Education Parent Advisory Council in Abington School District and regularly teaches and consults on learning disabilities.

Peggy now lives in Abington Township with her two boys Jon Mark (age 11) and Matthew (age 7). With her work and her two boys she has little time to engage her love of travel and "really good fiction."

Peggy pre-enrolled Jon Mark in the Whole Life Charter School in December of 2011 commenting "My child has ADHD and dyslexia and although not below grade level, he definitely needs the supports and types of instruction and mission it seems Whole Life Charter School deeply understands and is committed to providing. It would be terrific to see my son in a school that honors his unique personhood and creates environments for him to thrive as a learner! As an educator at all levels myself, I am deeply committed to education and to supporting institutions that capitalize on every child's strengths and see all the possibilities available to them!."

Peggy has come out strongly in support of the Whole Life Charter School and has testified as to the efficacy of and research behind the Whole Life Charter School teaching model in front of the Springfield Township School Board. Peggy has also offered to lend us her expertise and assist us through our startup process. I am understating it to say that Peggy is a wonderful new addition to our founding team and our school and i am grateful for her counsel and dedication.

Tweet

The building, at 1331 Ivy Hill Road on the border of Springfield Township, is packed to the rafters with new school goodness because it is, in fact, a new school building. Completed nearly three years ago by the West Oak Lane Church of God for use as a religious school, the building has remained largely unused because few students ever enrolled in the proposed religious school. It is an amazing school building, however, with 22 large naturally lit classrooms, a state-of-the-art gym/theatre, a gleaming new industrial kitchen and cafeteria, and an array of office spaces that will easily accommodate the needs of our administration, health and therapeutic professionals.

A state-of-the-art school building

This beautiful building is also completely ADA accessible; bathrooms are wheelchair ready and an elevator is installed for easy access to the second floor. It has a full playground for our lower school students with several outdoor play structures atop a padded play surface. Wired completely throughout for internet access to every room, the facility has a capable communications infrastructure that includes pre-wiring for telephones and cable hook-ups for television in every room we entered during our walk through. 1331 Ivy Hill Road also comes equipped with a complete security system that locks down every room in the building so that intruders can not enter classrooms even if they manage to gain access to the school building.

There are several other major advantages to this building over the other building we have designated in our application at 1200 Mermaid Lane. The first is its zoning. Unlike 1200 Mermaid Lane, it is already zoned as a school building. This is one less hurdle we will need to leap over should we receive authorization. The second is its placement. 1331 Ivy Hill Road is more than a quarter mile away from any Springfield Township residential neighborhood meaning that there should be no concerns over additional car, bus, or foot traffic from even our nearest neighbors (Ivy Hill Road is the border between Philadelphia and Springfield Township. 1331 is on a stretch of Ivy Hill Road that is almost entirely commercial). A full 135 space parking lot will easily accommodate our parking needs. 

1331 Ivy Hill Road is also 1100 feet closer to public transportation. SEPTA routes 18 and 77 are less than two football field lengths away. For those children arriving by school bus or by car, the parking area provides school bus ingress and egress which will allow us to safely load and unload all of our students independent of how they are transported.

It is pure understatement to say that we are very excited that this building has become available. 1331 Ivy Hill Road is an outstanding facility that would offer a wonderful, safe, state-of-the-art school environment to students at the Whole Life Charter School.

Tweet

The academic ramifications of this kind of learning are tremendous as everything the children are learning in their classes has immediate utility in their MicroSociety. Classroom math, science, language, and social studies reinforce the building of successful businesses and government in the small world our children will design and build and their work in that small world enlivens their learning experience in the classroom.

I recently received the following story in a message from the MicroSociety Kids in Charge News Team. It documents a genuine crisis situation that challenged a group of theatrical entrepreneurs in the MicroSociety at Sageland Elementary school in El Paso, Texas and offers a wonderful taste of the depth of the MicroSociety learning experience.

If you would like more information about how the Whole Life Charter School plans to incorporate the MicroSociety program, please call us at 215.701.4740 or request more information.

Turning a Crisis Around

Copyright © 2011 by MicroSociety, Inc.

Gathered around the table for their weekly business meeting, the employees of Scottie Glee-ater, the entertainment venture in Sageland Elementary's MicroSociety, were facing their first financial crisis. Their annual loan packet was due to the credit union in an hour and they were more than just a few Micro dollars short.

"Look, we need to figure out how much we need to hold us over for at least two pay periods. If we can make it to next month, we have our annual Talent Show and that always brings in the bucks," Valeria, the 6th grade casting director declared.

"Attendance at our weekly shows is down," she added, holding up a bar graph for all to see. "If we don't fill the seats at our next few Celebration Serenades, I hate to say it but we are…well, through. We need to get a survey out there to find out why we are losing fans."

Meanwhile Valeria drummed her fingers on her cheek. Consumers just weren't spending. She knew she wasn't. She had seen her dad cut back at home after he lost his job. "Save, Don't Crave" became her father's mantra. Valeria brought it with her to the Marketplace. Surely others brought their parents' practices too.

5th grade vocal artist, Victor, jumped out of his chair, "What if we invite Selena Gomez to perform with us?" he declared. A superstar would certainly boost their ticket sales.

"Wishful thinking," answered Angelina, "but not likely."

Analicia, the 5th grade co-producer, mumbled, "Well, I guess we could get rid of one of our employees. It happened at my mom's work. And we've got to pay bills. . ." she trailed off. Employees started sizing one another up, gauging who would be "the one" to go.

Valeria started making calculations in the margin of her paper. "If we let someone go, we could save–" Bryan, the 6th grade venture director, cut her off.

"Not a chance that we are downsizing here. Take away any one of us and the show cannot go on."

An idea came to him. "When the Walmart was in trouble they put everything on sale. It brought more people to the store. Even though the prices were lower, they made more money because more items sold."

Analicia shouted, "Spin the wheel! We could make a wheel and put percents in each section. 10%, 15%, even 20%. When consumers pass our box office, we can invite them to spin for a discount."

"Kinda like at a fair. People always pay to spin them there . . . and they don't even win every time," Victor pondered.   

Bryan interjected, "Just remember, we can't have a year-long sale. We won't last. Once we are back on track, we have to figure out what really happened to get us into this mess in the first place."

A serenade of "Yeah's" followed. It was reasonable. It was logical. It was a campaign. Not a permanent solution. "The Wheel Deal" they called it. In just one month, they were turning a profit again and adding new shows to their schedule to meet customer demand. There would be no more breaking the bank but plenty more "Break-A-Legs" for this crew… and hopefully no broken wheels!

To watch a video of Sageland Elementary Students describe their MicroSociety learning experience, click here. To download a PDF of the MicroSociety brochure, click here. To go to MicroSociety’s website, click here.

Tweet

Charter schools in Pennsylvania are charged with the education of traditionally under served populations as dictated by Act 22 of 1997, the charter school law of the Commonwealth. Frequently those starting charter schools are, like the kid who becomes a cop to right wrongs perpetrated against him, impelled to do so because they are part of the under served group their school is targeting. Some on our founding team, myself included, are inspired to make things right for just such an underserved group.

A school targeting children with learning disabilities

The Whole Life Charter School will be a tuition-free school designed to educate high functioning children struggling with learning disabilities, particularly Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Language Based Learning Disabilities (LBLD), and Asperger’s Syndrome (AS). Parents pre-enrolling their children talk about the repeated failure and frustration their children experience in schools that don't quite understand them and that are designed to educate their more numerous neurologically “normal” students. I am dismayed that nearly 40 years after I graduated from high school in what were the dark ages in our understanding of learning disabilities, these parents relate stories about their children’s school experiences that are so similar to my own. I was one of those children, too. 

I have good memories of kindergarten and my kindergarten teacher. She was tall and pretty and nice and she let me be the ring master in the circus show that we put on for our parents. We could play in kindergarten, eat snacks, go out to recess two or three times each day and be kids. Kindergarten was fun and it was the first and last really great year I ever had in public school.

First grade proved to be somewhat more challenging. My motors were constantly running and I was endlessly in motion. My hands tapped, my feet wiggled, my knees bounced up and down whenever I was confined to my seat. I remember trying to keep still by asking the kid sitting in his chair in front of me to push his chair back hard against the front of my desk. I'd then ask the kid behind me to push the front of her desk hard into the back of my chair. My hope was that together they would somehow clamp me into my seat.

Despite reading at a level five years more advanced than my grade, my grades were tumbling by my third year in public school. Intending to stem the avalanche of bad reports cards, my mother took me to see a psychiatrist. Her name is Dr. Robbins. Despite Dr. Robbins’ best efforts my grades continued to decline and my behavior worsened in class. When sixth grade rolled around my teacher, Mr. Rothman, told my parents that he saw no evidence of my intelligence whatsoever despite the fact that my advanced reading scores placed me in the same foreign language classes as all the smart kids which I obviously was not. Mr. Rothman’s assessment of me was truly deflating but nothing hurt as much as when he pulled me from the school crossing guard program. Wearing that florescent orange harness and shiny metal badge, carrying that stop sign, and that genuine feeling of pride that came with being helpful is my only pleasant memory of a sixth grade that I otherwise fared poorly in at best.

Seventh, eighth and ninth grades went by in a blur. It was the late sixties and students were staging sit-ins to oppose the Vietnam war at my junior high school. I took part in these protests not because I had a strong reaction to the horrors in Vietnam but rather because it was an excuse to get out of class. I felt pretty stupid most of the time and was rarely prepared with homework or book reports. I became a much more serious disciplinary problem in both public and Hebrew school where i was known for shooting rubber bands not at other students but at the backs of my teachers while they wrote on the blackboards. Largely at odds with and marginalized by my peer group, I had only two friends, both of whom were equally eschewed by our classmates.

I had been analyzed by Dr. Robbins for a 50 minute hour every Wednesday at 4:00 PM for over five years by the time I entered my first year of high school. During those years she guessed I was victim to a parade of brain based disorders including Minimal Brain Dysfunction (MBD), dyslexia, and hyperactivity among others as there was no clear diagnosis for what seemed to be my problem. The year was 1970. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder wasn't even ghost text in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) at the time and without a diagnosis there was little treatment to recommend other than hours and hours of conversation.

Three classes kept me going to school in tenth grade: Art class, English class and Speech/Theatre class. The school’s vice principal gave me a permanent pass which allowed me to leave any class whenever the spirit moved. Once out of class I was permitted to stroll through the halls or fill the bird feeders in the school’s center courtyard. The vice principal most likely allowed this more to protect my teachers and their classrooms from my disruptions rather than to give me an opportunity to release some of my energy.

In eleventh grade, I was cutting just about any class that came before homeroom at 9:30 AM because I usually went to sleep at 4:00 am and couldn't wake up in time to catch the 7:00 AM bus for class starting only 20 minutes later. Theatre, and art, still held my attention enough to keep me going to school. I also won the comic lead in the school’s musical production, South Pacific, that year which insured my attendance at least in the afternoon classes. Dr. Robbins and I developed some ideas that often helped me manage my in-class hyperactivity. We leveraged my penchant for art and my love of hand work and directed it into the creation of leather shoes and boots of my own design. The school allowed me to sew this foot ware together in any class I cared to. Passing a thick steel sewing needle through several layers of leather took great physical effort and occupied me in a way that still allowed me to listen to, and take part in, the lectures and discussion. (This, by the way, is something I doubt a kid could get away with nowadays because sewing leather requires sewing needles and sewing needles would be considered a weapon at many schools).

I somehow managed to get to the first semester of twelfth grade. Once there, I was meeting school on many of my own terms which means that I was technically absent more days than I wa that year because I figured out that they couldn't discipline me for cutting if I was absent and they couldn't fail me in the remaining classes if I showed up for them. I failed every one of my first period classes since tenth grade which somehow never inspired the school to start me at a later time despite my repeated requests.

The traditional teaching method employed at the time was no match for my uncontrollable energy. School simply did not work for me. As I stumbled and failed my way through much of it I was left only with a diminished sense of ability and self esteem (despite the fact that I won the schools’ Excellence in Theatre award for that year which I, sadly, wasn't present to collect at at the graduation ceremony having failed both senior English and Social Studies).

Thirty two years after I graduated from high school I became a 9th grade computer teacher at a private high school for girls. No later than the first day of orientation at my new job was I involved in a discussion about returning students for whom our traditional style of education was failing. There was Whitney who by ninth grade had a disciplinary history that rivaled my own as a student. "The Two Jenns" were two girls who I later discovered cheating via text message during a test I was giving (they forgot to silence their phones). “Jenn 1” was also known to attempt escape from her middle school classes by crawling along the floor towards the rear door of the classroom as her teachers scrawled on the board at the front. Megan was an incredibly bright girl who was bottoming out in her classes. She proved her smarts by constructing a scavenger hunt in which she set up a pathway of user accounts I was to log into, each holding a clue to the next site on which one of the accounts had been activated. She told me that if I wanted to see her homework assignment I had to scavenge to the end of the path. After an hour of searching through some of the most creative uses of the internet I have ever witnessed to date, I discovered her perfectly completed assignment. Her brilliance and creativity was neither appreciated nor terribly obvious in other classes. 

I chose to build this charter school because children need a school that does more than meets the minimum legal guidelines (and economic outlay) for the education of children that struggle. We need a school that is structured to respond to the very real physical and emotional needs of children struggling with ADHD or Asperger’s Syndorme in addition to their academic requirements. Let's build a school for the child who needs coaching in interpersonal relationships, as children with Asperger's and ADHD often do and that provides such coaching when a child falls out of sorts with a classmate or friend. Let's experiment with ways to teach every subject as actively as we can imagine for hyperactive kids who need to move by thinking differently about classroom instruction, classroom seating, or maybe even thinking differently about what makes a classroom itself. Let's be honest and realize that a child who builds bicycles in her sleep, tears through books and magazines on bicycle construction and mechanics, but won't touch Shakespeare with a ten foot poll will probably choose a career that leverages her mechanical ability and visual creativity. She will probably not become an English teacher no matter how many Sonnets she is required to read. 

I am the parent of a child with a learning disability and have been the teacher of many children who struggled because of a neurological makeup that causes their brains to fire in patterns dissimilar to those of their more uniform peers. As a student who struggled through school because of my own disabilities I am admittedly still licking the wounds of my youth.

My hope, and the hope of my founding team, is that we will build a school that will lessen the pain for those children with learning differences who are struggling academically despite their best efforts, are being marginalized by their peers, and who are trying to grow into accomplished adults as their self esteem withers.

In Part 3 of this series I will outline some of the roadblocks we have been challenged with that are not generally discussed in manuals offering information on starting a charter school.

Tweet

As an educator, I am interested in the latter three groups and have a particular interest in the kids struggling through the traditional school model as described above because they are dealing with a learning disability like ADHD,  Specific Learning Disorders, or Asperger's Syndrome. I am deeply interested in the children that are the misfits and the distractions and  the kids that fly under the radar, preferring to go unnoticed rather than expose themselves as the dumb kid they believe they are. I am interested because I was one of those kids.

Ten years ago after observing, with dismay and empathy, these children in classes I now taught, I decided to make them my top priority, to design an educational approach that would help them shine, that would remove the stigma of stratification, that would help them find ways to manage their disabilities and, most of all, that would help them repair their often damaged self esteem. The problem though, was that I felt it wasn't something I could achieve in my one classroom. After much consideration, I believed that optimally supporting the education of the whole child could only be achieved in a new educational paradigm and, perhaps, in a completely different kind of school.

One year later, after hours upon hours of research, I attended an introductory conference at Drexel University. The topic was charter schools, what one needed to do to start a charter school in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and, particularly, in Philadelphia. The presenters were from the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the Pennsylvania Coalition of Charter Schools (PCCS), the oldest of two information dissemination and lobbying arms of the charter school movement in Pennsylvania (the second one is defunct), and an organization called Foundations, Inc. Foundations, I was to learn, helped people through the many steps of starting a charter school.

The meeting's presenters, particularly those representing Foundations, Inc. outlined the charter school application and approval process, describing a few of the pitfalls one might encounter in the application process and the reasons therefore that one might want to hire a specialist to help with the process. Tim Daniels, the founder and president of the PCCS described a competitive Pennsylvania "planning" grant that was soon to be offered to those having charter school aspirations and the benefits of having a membership in his organization. The Philadelphia School Reform Commission closed the meeting by inviting the participants to apply for a charter in their great city.

Altogether, the Drexel introduction was very informative. Still, what was omitted by those speakers has proven to be far more important than what was actually offered. Were the introduction truly complete it would have started with a questionnaire not terribly different from one you might encounter when trying to determine a perfect occupation. This questionnaire would ask you if your friends and associates would consider you highly entrepreneurial. Check? Would they consider you singularly tenacious? Check. How about resilient? Check. Fearless? Check. Would your friends and associates say that you are out of your flipping mind? Hmmm.

Even with the best of motivations, starting a charter school is not something one should take on unless one is genuinely entrepreneurial, tenacious, resilient, fearless and, yes, also a little crazy. This is so because merely getting the doors of a charter school open on a sunny fall morning in September has all of the challenge of opening the doors to an operating medium sized company serving several hundred clients. Add to that formidable task layers of complication added by strict local, state, and federal law and some very frustrating layers of federal, state, and local politics and you still have only an inkling of what it takes to realize a charter school. One's success will be the result of many fortunate events happening together at just the right moment while one's failure will often be the result of a single omission.

Starting a charter school also requires money, lots and lots of money. There are many services that you will need to pay for along the way and representatives of those services will be wanting to hand you a business card at the end of an introductory similar to the one I attended in 2004.

At the end of that introductory meeting, I was approached by one of the primary executives of Foundations, Inc. who's name I now forget, a lawyer specializing in special education law from the firm Latsha, Yohe, Davis, and McKenna, Tim Daniels from the PCCA and several other individuals including a young man who spent his entire time at the introductory tapping on his laptop's keyboard two seats to my left in that auditorium. His name, I was to learn, is Alex. He holds a Ph.D. in education and developed charter school applications for people with similar interests to my own. That night I took home several business cards given me by some very persuasive representatives. Each recounted past successes in their area of expertise and described how they were the best choice when considering a consultant to assist in designing your school's educational program, finding an appropriate building in which to house those children, developing your school's budget or legally representing your school's charter application at a public hearing. Each representative promised to hold the key to the charter school door that I would, on one sunny September morning, open to children who have struggled with their ADHD, their language issues, or their Asperger's Syndrome and each representative had a price.

Part 2: If it's so hard to start a Charter School, Why do it?

Tweet

As an individual with eight years experience in the charter school application process and as the founder of a charter school specifically targeting children with learning differences, I can speak from experience that oversight and charter school authorization by local school boards, particularly those representing smaller school districts, has only limited opportunities for innovation by charter schools.

Act 22, the Pennsylvania Charter School law under consideration for changes, inadvertently created the process of chartering schools a politically contentious one made so by the district’s real desire to retain students and the State funds that follow them. Act 22 does this by asking districts to authorize schools that will diminish the means to the districts’ survival. Adding insult, Act 22 directs school districts to “write the check” to charter schools in an amount equal to the money the districts allocate for the education of those students minus about 20%. Reasonably, districts respond by protecting their turf and, sadly, innovative school models conforming to the best intentions of Act 22 and the strictest interpretation of the PA school code are frequently denied the opportunity to bring about educational innovation and options.

Districts can deny a charter for any reason they can imagine without having to support their reasoning. We received a denial in which the district ironically suggested that the experimental model we proposed was not certain to succeed because it was unproven. Even more ironic, the board indicated that the model offered "nothing new" and therefore had little experimental value in the same denial.

Partially because school districts can deny charters in this manner, the chartering process in the Commonwealth has also become a legal one and, subject to the high hourly rates that attorneys demand, an expensive one. This is so because school districts bring their solicitors into the process of vetting a charter school. Regarding three of our own applications, taxpayers were not only paying school district solicitors for their attendance at 10 to 12 hours of public hearing but also paying them to author denial summations of over 50 pages each. To fight back, charter school applicants have replied by securing representation of their own. The money to pay for this representation comes out of the pockets of the taxpayers via the applicants hard won State or Federal Planning and Implementation grants. Consider that the appeals process for a charter school applicant denied by a school district costs a minimum of $15,000 and can go as high as $35,000. Until 2009, Pennsylvania grants were given in amounts up to $75,000 dollars. A single application can easily cost nearly as much in legal fees to the applicant and creates an additional barrier to innovation.

Districts reasonably consider costs additional to the financial hit they would take if they lost students. At the close of a public hearing during which our proposal was awarded a charter, I graciously thanked the district's superintendent and invited her and her team to visit our new school. She replied, "I doubt I'll have the time." Those working in public education know that resources like time are stretched to the limit. Requiring districts to oversee the charter schools they would authorize gives school districts another reason not to authorize them and again subverts innovation.

Newly passed education budget cuts will encourage school districts to hold on even tighter to smaller financial resources while the costs for educational products and services they need only increase.

For the purposes of depoliticizing the chartering of schools at the district level and realizing innovative new schools constrained only by a careful vetting process purely focused on the future of education and student opportunity, I believe it is imperative that the General Assembly authorize and fund a central charter schools commission during this upcoming session.

Tweet

updated: 11/29/11

We have been offered occupancy of a truly wonderful building for the Whole Life Charter School. The building is located at 1200 Mermaid Lane in Springfield Township. The owner of the building, Steven Kurtz, his wife Mary, and his son Christopher are very excited to lease the property to us and have already expended capital and time researching architectural and zoning contingencies. Both Steve and Mary were teachers earlier on in their careers.

The building in question presently holds 67,000 ft.² and approximately 92 parking spaces. It is one of four contiguous industrial properties owned by the Kurtz family on that street. Of this 67,000 ft.² we will lease approximately 45,000 ft.². The building is divided into office and warehouse space where approximately 50,000 ft.² is office space. We will occupy nearly all of the office area. Prior to opening, we will fit-out this space with advisories, science and art classrooms, and administrative offices. An already existing cafeteria and kitchen in the lower most level will be refurbished for our use. While not easily visible from the Mermaid Lane, there is plenty of space in the rear of the building to install a playground and a greenhouse.

Additional updates to the building will include a full sprinkler system, handicapped accessible bathrooms, and an elevator.

Mermaid Lane, is located near two bus lines, Route 309, Cheltenham Township and the northwest border of Philadelphia. The building is one half block away from two very large parks, one having a duck pond and the other one having a sports field. The Federal Department of Agriculture, which offered to help our school build a greenhouse and send their scientists to work with our students when we were first granted a charter from the Springfield Township school district four years ago is also just down the street.

Tweet