This year marks the 14th of the Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School. We are the second oldest charter school in the city of Atlanta, and we are preparing to submit the application to renew our charter and take us up to entering our third decade of educating students in southeast Atlanta. The renewal process, by design, draws out reflection on the highlights of the past five years and projections about what the next charter term will hold, so those thoughts are very much on my mind as we embark on the start of our current school year.
Back in 2011, we set out to achieve a not insignificant task: to merge two schools, with two cultures, histories, and campuses. And we began that work in the context of the biggest drop in public education funding any of us has ever known. Though not without its challenges, I believe we can say that we’ve been successful in creating an academically enriching, well-governed K-8 school, culminating in being named the 2015 Georgia “Charter School of the Year”.
We—all of us currently at ANCS and all who’ve contributed time and energy to our school through the years—should take pride in these accomplishments. But we should not assume that our job now is to simply “keep doing what we’ve been doing”. From the very first days of our school, there’s been a spirit of innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship that’s flowed through the school, and we should honor that spirit by asking, “What can we do to make ANCS even better?” In so doing, I don’t mean to imply that what’s come before hasn’t been good enough–far from it. Rather, we should believe that just as we teach our students that there is always more to learn and an area in which to grow, so too can our school evolve to serve the students of 2015 in ways that improve upon what we did in 2002.
Part of this evolution means figuring out what our role in the broader educational community is. Having survived the early start up years to now thrive as a relatively long-tenured charter school, we have an obligation, I believe, to engage with the world beyond the walls of our school. The clearest manifestation of this engagement is the development of our Center for Collaborative Learning. As a school with no plans to add more students or to replicate our approach, the CCL provides an outlet for us to partner with others in impacting the learning of more students by sharing our practices, supporting schools in pursuing student-centered changes they’d like to make, and working together to deepen our shared understandings about teaching and learning—all in the collaborative manner that is true to our vision of learning.
Last school year, our CCL did a tremendous amount of work hosting school visits and workshops and establishing partnerships, which you can can read about in this update from last spring. We’ve now also become one of just a handful of regional centers striving to advance the common principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools in schools around the U.S.
While this focus on outreach and collaboration has (we hope) positively affected those with whom we partner, I also have seen the tangible benefits this work has had on our own school. First, it affords veteran educators at ANCS the opportunity to take on teacher leadership roles as mentors and coaches that complement their experience in the classroom and provide them with work that is different but just as meaningful. The availability of these roles helps keep teachers at our school, working with our students, when they might otherwise be at a stage in their careers where leadership positions might take them out of the classroom. And, by facilitating the process of reflection with other teachers, many of our own teacher coaches report that their own teaching practice has improved as a result.
Another benefit that comes to ANCS from collaborating with other schools lies in the longer view that by partnering to improve teaching and learning in all schools—particularly those serving students in grades K-8—we are eventually impacting the experience these students will have when many of them are all together in high school. The fact that we are now able to operate in an environment where neighboring schools—be they district-managed or charter—can and do come together to learn with and from one another is a far cry from where things used to be. I’m sure it’s a development we’ll see the fruits of as ANCS comes to the end of our next charter term.