Charter School Reflection

Interviewer: Mike, tell me a little bit about your experience working with charter schools here in Delaware.

Interviewee: It pre dates my lawman as a chairman of the board for Mapleton Charter startup. I had been involved with the Charter School Accountability Committee within the Department of Education. I had served the department at First Director of Curriculum and later as Director of Assessment. Part of the committee assignments I drew were on charter school accountability, so my staff and I would evaluate all knew charter applications and renewal applications for competence and compliance.

Recently, in the 2013-14 school years, I was the chairman of the founding board for the Maplewood Charter School, that was successfully approved
We were questioned by folks who had already been though that process so that we could make sure that we had thought through how we want to approach this and how we are going to answer. Charter was approved by split vote by the state board, which I thought was kind of an omen.

Two of the board members were really worried that a developer was paying for this charter application and was saying, we’re going to put charter school right in this nonexistent community. A board member said, since when are allowing developers to dictate process to us. That was Pat Haffern and George Blendness and I had considered them to be allies. When I was in the department, they were very corgial to me.

Interviewer: Tell me if I am right or wrong, but typically what the board does is take whatever the accountability groups representation is and go with that and the secretary of
If you want to talk about some of the crazy stuff you ran into after that.

Interviewee: Like I said, Innovative Schools and the developer had been in conversations for at least a year before I got involved. They had pretty well selected a program model, a location, a set of agreements that are in the charter application itself; we must use Innovative Charter schools management, there was no choice there. We must site the school in Mapleton phase one.

We must open in August 2016. The kicker, from a programmatic standpoint, we must feature expeditionary learning, responsive classrooms and a very radical teacher professional program and looping all with the first four years of the program. One of those would be a monumental thing needing a long runway. To try all four of them, with a very young population of kindergarten, was off the boards in terms of the difficulty level.

Interviewer: What were some of the