4/28/08

Plain Dealer

Thomas Ott

The Cleveland school district and charter-school operator John Zitzner find that the adage, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” sometimes works for both sides.

The district, which loses many students to privately run, publicly funded charter schools, serves as the nonprofit sponsor that Zitzner’s Entrepreneurship Preparatory School needs under Ohio law. E Prep, as the business-oriented school is called, is the only charter embraced by the city system.

Cleveland school officials monitor Zitzner’s charter in return for a sliver of its state aid. More important, the district can lump E Prep’s promising test scores with its own and tout the charter as one of its specialty schools.

What does E Prep get? Credibility. That helps Zitzner raise private money to supplement state aid. The Cleveland and George Gund foundations are among the contributors.

Zitzner, warmly praised by city school officials, says the relationship proves that traditional public schools and charters can work together.

“This is about how we educate our urban kids and send them to college, period,” he said.

E Prep borrows practices from East Coast schools. Its unusual blueprint starts with the school day and calendar. The school operates from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 11 months a year, breaking from mid-July to mid-August.

The charter opened in August 2006 with the sixth grade and added the seventh last year. It will expand to the eighth grade next school year and hopes to start an elementary school in 2009. Officials are working out a plan for a high school.

E Prep plans to move this summer into leased space at Tyler Village, an arts, technology and education park being developed in a former elevator plant at E. 36th Street and Superior Avenue. For now, it’s in the ShoreBank building, on E. 105th Street near the community of Bratenahl.

The school hammers home a message that not only can its children go to college — they will. To reach that destination, it sets a rigid course.

Students get one hour a day each in reading, writing, mathematics, social studies and science. The last 90 minutes of the day are devoted to enrichment activities such as choir, physical education and Boy Scouts.

Business studies will be introduced next year in the eighth grade and will spread to lower grades if children are mastering other subjects, said Zitzner, founder of a software company that he sold to Xerox in 1998.

Last year’s state achievement test scores showed rapid progress at the school. Three-fourths of the sixth-graders passed reading tests, compared with 7 percent on exams administered by the school at the start of classes. More than 60 percent were judged proficient in math, up from 12 percent.

E Prep’s 10 teachers, working with electronic “smart boards” instead of chalkboards, use stopwatches to stick to a series of tasks. Children who finish a task early turn to one of the 30 books they must read each year.

The first week of classes is “culture camp,” at which students learn a strict code of conduct. Rules include walking to the right, single-file, in the hall and not talking in the cafeteria until a paper red dot on the wall is taken down and replaced with green.

Ann Mullin of the Gund Foundation has toured the school and talked to the students. She says they took the restrictions in stride.

“The children seem to enjoy the rigor and really take pride in their ability to perform at high levels,” she said.

But the academic regimen and 11-month, 10-hour-a-day grind are not for every student and family.

E Prep had 215 students last fall; the number now stands at 170. Zitzner and Marshall Emerson III, head of the school, acknowledge that retention is a problem and they are trying to solve it. Most students are from Cleveland, but a number of suburbs also are represented.

Monica Peake, a single mother from Bedford Heights, gives up a lot of time and gas money so her son, Xavier, can attend E Prep. She drives him to and from school each day, more than 30 minutes one way.

Xavier, a seventh-grader who previously was home-schooled, enjoys soccer, swimming and golf. But he must fit them in on weekends or give them up, his mother said. Soccer, with weeknight practices at 5 or 5:30, had to go, she said.

“His education is the most important thing,” said Peake, who heads the school’s parents association. “Soccer is great, but the bottom line is, if he doesn’t have his education, he won’t be able to play soccer anywhere. He won’t be able to play at a collegiate level. He won’t have the grades.”

This ambitious plan costs money. E Prep’s budget is $2.6 million a year, but state and federal money total only $1.8 million. The school raises the other $800,000.

E Prep spends about $13,000 per student. The statewide average was $9,500 in the 2006-07 school year, the last year for which information was available. The average in the eight big-city districts was about $12,250.

E Prep pays beginning teachers $45,000 a year, about $9,000 more than the Cleveland schools pay.

The school is beginning to discuss ways it can work with two other highly regarded Cleveland charters — Citizens’ Academy and the Intergenerational School — to save money.

Zitzner said once the three charters cement a relationship, they can talk to the Cleveland schools about further collaboration. Eugene Sanders, the district’s chief executive officer, said he will listen.

Cooperation might be the key to charter schools’ survival, said Brooke King, executive director of the Intergenerational School. Raising money is exhausting. Charter schools get no local taxes, no money for buildings.

“We’re really trying to transform public education. We would like to partner with the biggest entity in our city to do that together,” King said. “The sad fact of the matter is, there are too many low-quality charters in Ohio. We’re not necessarily pro-charter; we’re pro-quality.”

The school operates from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, 11 months a year, breaking in mid-July.