During tomorrows board meeting they are scheduled to approve 4 charter schools and allow three struggling ones to continue.
The Tiger
Academy one of the most connected schools around with board members, Mia Jones,
Nat Glover and John Delaney has received a D grade the past 2 years, and if it
gets a D or a F this year it’s
going to be allowed to continue for three more. Why isn’t it being shut down if
it gets a D or a F, isn’t the five years it has had long enough to know it
isn’t getting the job done?
The Global Outreach Academy is a little less connected and
its grades are not much better as it received a C and a D the last two year,
instead of letting it expand for three more years if it gets a D or a F, how
about you make a rule that says if you get a D you get a one year contract and
if you get a couple Ds or worse in a row you get closed down.
Then
there is the SOCK academy, which had a run of four straight Ds only to be
interrupted by last year’s F. Their track record of 15 years worth of mediocrity
and worse should not be the model for the Global Outreach and Tiger academies.
They should be nipped in the bud.
On top of
all they are planning to give approval to the same group four charter schools,
two virtual ones and two brick and mortar ones. How does them going from zero
to four make any sense? How about awarding them one contract to see how they do
and then if they are successful they are allowed to expand.
For a
group of people who recently said they want to bring students back from charter
schools, presumably because they know Duval’s public schools as a group are doing
much better they seem to be approving a lot of charter schools and allowing a
lot of failing or struggling charter schools to continue going.
Section
1002.33(8)(a), Florida Statutes, requires the District to "make student
academic achievement for all students the most important factor in determining
whether to renew or terminate the charter."
I don’t know how a reasonable person could think these
schools give any child the best chance for academic success. Then again our board
is not made up of very many reasonable people.
Vitti and the Board are both controlled by Chartrand so it should not surprise anyone that Vitti and the School Board are giving away the Duval Public Schools
ReplyDeleteAs a teacher at SOS Academy, I invite you to visit to see that we work hard, much harder in fact to ensure student achievement. However, we have to work with what we are given, which is very low performing students coming from the district's schools who at the middle school level can't multiply and divide multi digit numbers, reading on 1st and 3rd grade levels, have sorry parents, etc. All charter schools aren't bad. We are not sitting on our a**es collecting a paycheck. All this will be evident when this year's grades are posted. But the fact that we increased by two letter grades or that are proficiency rates in math at all 3 grade levels were higher than or equal to the surrounding "better" district schools will not be highly publicized. When you speak of charter schools, you are speaking against teachers too. We are teachers too, with some if not better credentials than you district teachers. Majority of us are at charter schools, because of the "bullies" (administrators) you speak of in your posts. Even though we are given less to work with, we do more than ever.
ReplyDeleteA lot of times, from my experience, students come from schools like JWJ to SOS because of the incompetent and jack ass teachers that are in the classrooms of district schools that lack any passion for students.