Academic success gives families a reason to stay in Cleveland

The Plain Dealer

1/28/2008

Scott Stephens

Plain Dealer Reporter

If not for Old Brooklyn Community School, Kerrin Shafer would be an ex-Clevelander.

“It was a savior for us,” said Shafer, who has two children in the State Road charter school. “We were ready to leave the city because of the schools. We stayed because of this school.”

After a rocky start, charter schools — independent, tuition-free schools that are publicly funded but privately operated — are taking root in Ohio neighborhoods.

Though some charters have been plagued by dismal test scores and fiscal chaos, the best have emerged as anchors in communities where parents had once given up on public schools.

Take Old Brooklyn Community. The school, which began 10 years ago with 27 students in a church annex, was one of Ohio’s original 15 charter schools. Principal Cherie Kaiser remembers meeting with curious parents in a borrowed room at Deaconess Hospital.

“I told them I had a vision and I knew it was going to be fantastic,” Kaiser said. “Fortunately, most parents stuck with it.”

Today, Old Brooklyn Community occupies a large, three-story building on State Road that houses more than 300 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The school soon will begin a $3 million expansion that will include an auditorium, gymnasium and computer lab.

Old Brooklyn Community has even grown to the point of needing Constellation Schools, a nonprofit school management firm, to help with its day-to-day business operation.

In its 10 years, the school has changed with the world around it. It began with a Montessori program in which students learned at their own pace but scrapped that plan when the federal No Child Left Behind law came along and required all children to progress on the same schedule.

School changes with the community

The academy, which once served a neighborhood that was largely white and middle class, also has adapted to a more diverse student body. This year, about 28 percent of the students are racial or ethnic minorities, and about half of the youngsters qualify for free or reduced lunch.

But Old Brooklyn Community continues to excel academically, achieving all of the state benchmarks on last year’s report card in the elementary grades and earning an excellent rating. In October, 85 percent of the school’s current third-graders passed the state reading test.

Parents have responded by building the school’s staff a teachers lounge. Local businesses have helped out with everything from tutoring to landscaping.

“It’s tremendously important to the fabric of the community,” said Cleveland Councilman Kevin Kelley, whose Ward 16 includes the school. “If I could have four more schools like Old Brooklyn Community, I’d take them.”

The line between traditional and charter

Not everyone has welcomed the school. In the decade since the first charters were established, they have been the subject of lawsuits, protests and derision.

One of the sharpest critics has been the Ohio Federation of Teachers, which contends charter schools have drained badly needed state education dollars from public school districts to the tune of $2.7 billion over the past 10 years and offered — as a whole — poor academic results.

“We have never, as an organization, been against all charter schools,” said the union’s president, Sue Taylor. “We adamantly do believe charter schools should be held to the same standards as traditional public schools. And we are philosophically opposed to education money going to for-profit operations. We categorically think that’s bad business.”

Charter school advocates counter that they actually collect less money per pupil than other public schools. They also argue that while there are mechanisms to close poor-performing charter schools, it’s virtually impossible to close a regular public school that is failing.

Whatever the case, charter schools — which now number 324 statewide and enroll 80,000 students — aren’t going away. But there are signs that the cold war between charter and traditional public schools could be thawing and that collaboration could be on the horizon.

Old Brooklyn Community, for example, will host a $1 million summer program for public-school students featuring lessons about local culture sponsored by the Cleveland Foundation. Work rules in the unionized city schools precluded using their buildings as the host site.

Likewise, Ward 17 Councilman Matt Zone sponsors an art show each year for children from any of the two Catholic, one private, one charter and five city schools in his ward.

“Catholic, charter, public — as a councilman, I don’t want to pick who I support,” Zone said. “I support them all.”

Charter schools also appear to be leveraging changes in public school districts. The Cleveland city schools, for example, have established single-gender academies and have plans for other specialty schools to keep the district competitive in the education marketplace.

“Parents are choosing certain kinds of options,” Cleveland schools Chief Executive Eugene Sanders said last fall. “People go for their perception of safety, their perception of a more vibrant kind of academy environment. We have to do a better job of communicating and responding.”

Sometimes that communication can produce surprising results.

Success keeping families in Cleveland

When Citizens’ Academy surveyed its parents, more than 40 percent said the school — consistently among the state’s top performers — played an integral role in their decision to remain in Cleveland. To Perry White, the East Side charter school’s director, that means successful schools are as much an economic development issue as an education issue.

“To stem the exodus of families from Cleveland, we must leverage our best public schools — charter and district — as catalysts for creating neighborhoods of choice,” White said. “The future of our city and region depends on it.”

Josipa Peric can vouch for that. Peric, who works as a waitress, has a fourth-grader at Citizens’. Another son graduated from the school two years ago and was awarded a scholarship to attend University School, a prestigious private school.

Peric said she and her husband had planned to leave Cleveland and move to Eastlake with other Croatian immigrants. Through friends, they discovered Citizens’ and transferred their two sons there from Catholic school. Now, they plan to stay in town and open a bakery here.

“We were planning to move, too, but the school is great,” Peric said. “They are like family to us.”

That kind of symbiotic relationship between parents and schools, which died in some neighborhoods decades ago, could be the greatest legacy of the charter movement.

“Any time you start something new, trust is a big issue,” said Old Brooklyn Community’s Kaiser. “We need the community as much as the community needs us.”

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