Charter schools provide option for education

Parents looking for options in early schooling for their children have another option to consider this year with the August opening of Magnolia School of Excellence on Clyde Fant Parkway.

The new charter school is the rst new school to open in Caddo Parish in over two decades and will begin by offering classes for children in grades kindergarten through sixth grade with grades seven and eight to be added later.

It is the third charter school to open in Caddo Parish since Linear Leadership Academy and Linwood Public Charter School began operating as charter schools a few years ago.

Both of those schools were failing public middle schools that were taken over and reopened through the Recovery School District, a special school district run by the Louisiana Department of Education that intervenes in the management of chronically lowperforming schools.

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that run independently of the school district, operating under the same state guidelines but different governance than public and private schools. They have more autonomy than district-run schools but with greater accountability.

Like public schools, charter schools are free for students and must enroll any student who applies as long as the school has space. They can be a better t for a child who may not have the skill set for a magnet school or one whose family may not have the nancial resources for a private school.

“Charter schools can cut through some of the red tape that chokes public schools and makes it dif cult for them to make changes,” said Dr. Phillip Rozeman, a local cardiologist and member of the MSE Board of Directors and the Shreveport Charter Foundation Board of Trustees.

“There’s some freedom from those rules and regulations. However, we are accountable and held to the same outcomes as a traditional public school. We’re graded the same way,” he said.

Another advantage, he said, is the freedom the school has to choose who gets hired or not without being bound to the same bureaucracy as public schools.

Rozeman said a charter school is not the same as using vouchers, which give parents money to send their children to private schools that do not have the same accountability and outcome measures as a public or charter school.

Rozeman said the MSE is doing everything they can to make sure this charter school and its students succeed.

“We have strived to assure that our impacted demographic is the same as the community we serve,” he said. “About two-thirds of Caddo students are on free and reduced lunch, and we work toward meeting that segment to match it with the school, so we aren’t just picking lowversus high-income families. It’s open to all, and we want to reach out to students who have the greatest need and don’t have choices open to them otherwise.

“Caddo has signi cant options for families who have money and can afford private schools. What we’ve been missing, and what this school is geared for, is people who aren’t necessarily academically advanced or have large nancial resources, or who otherwise might have to go to an assigned public school.”

Charter Schools USA was chosen as the curriculum management service for MSE because of its past success and nancial prudency, Rozeman said.

“They are one of the largest, most experienced educational provider organizations in the country with an over- 95 percent satisfaction rate from parents and students,” he said. “And they offer individualized learning and character education plans for each student.”

The response to the opening of the school has been tremendous with more than 1,500 applications received from all of the eight major ZIP code areas, prompting the school to expand its enrollment to its maximum of 650.

“It’s exceeded our expectations,” Rozeman said. “Charter schools have not been a key component of this area, and past results for the charter middle schools have not been the best because, while they had the basic qualities of a charter school, the problem was they were taking over old schools that had serious problems for a long time. What they’re doing now with RSD is much harder, and it’s harder to make that work.

“We are offering something very different by creating a whole new culture of schooling with a brand new school, serving students who have the best chances of making signi cant strides because they’re younger and just starting out. We can give them a better education, and they’ll have more opportunity through their lives.”

Rozeman said there were eight other groups seeking charter school authorization from Caddo Parish School Board at the same time as MSE, but because the process is so dif cult and exacting, none of those were authorized.

For information about the school, go to the website www. magnoliacharter.net.

– Eric Lincoln