Today I was introduced to the Optimist’s Club, the West Side Chapter, at little El Rodeo restaurant off West Uintah. The Optimist’s Club is “an association of more than 3,000 Optimist Clubs around the world dedicated to ‘Bringing Out the Best in Kids’.”

Scott, Alan, and I were invited to attend, and we were privileged to hear Dr. Nicholas Gledich, the new superintendent of District 11, speak to the group. He gave us a brief summary of his introduction here to Colorado Springs and the way that he has ‘hit the ground learning’. One of the interesting notes was that, in order to get a feel for Colorado Springs, he visited the local malls on Friday nights to watch kids interact, and he visited a variety of grocery stores to see a cross-section of people.

He mentioned that the book Execution: the Discipline of Getting Things Done (Bossidy, Charan, and Burck) has been very instrumental in shaping his view of leadership, and he used elements from that book in his core statements about his leadership for D11.The book sounds intriguing and I’m looking forward to reading it.

We were also delighted to meet Bob Null, a member of the District 11 School Board, and introduce ourselves and our charter idea, and talk with the Kenyon Jordan, owner and editor of The Westside Pioneer newspaper (http://www.westsidepioneer.com/) as well.

As a mom, and an aunt, and a teacher, I’m very appreciative of how many people are interested and investing in the lives of our children. I appreciate the wide variety of populations that District 11 serves, and I am also glad when I hear, as I did today, that it’s about the kids, that the people who invest their time and effort and skills towards education are keeping the needs of the kids at the forefront of what they’re doing.

As a mom, and an aunt, and a teacher now concerned about the need for a program that uses the following five categories of best practices…

• a student-centered approach that is challenging, authentic, experiential and developmental
• a cognitive approach that is reflective, constructivist, expressive and developing
• a social approach that is democratic and collaborative
• a differentiated approach that provides for a variety of student need
• a brain-based approach that utilizes neuro-scientific research

… I’m an optimist, too. I believe that the kids in our community can accomplish amazing things, and that some of them need this type of program to do so… and someday I may just have to think about joining an Optimist Club  myself.

Best Practice, Third Edition by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde (Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH): 2005

Best Practices in Gifted Education: An Evidence-Based Guide, by Robinson, Shore, and Enerson (National Association for Gifted Education, Prufrock Press: Waco, TX): 2007

Enriching the Brain: How to Maximize Every Learner’s Potential, by Jensen (Josey Bass: San Francisco): 2006

What’s the job of a ‘Boot Camp’?

Some might say that a good one whips you into shape, dumps you into the language, vision, and perspective you need to have for success, pushes you to the limit, tests your commitment, and ultimately inspires you to be all that you can be.

The Boot Camp for Charter Schools was a great one.

Organized and presented by the charter school division of CDE (Colorado Department of Education), CSI (the Charter School Institute), and “the League” (of Charter Schools), the degree of commitment and cooperation between these three entities on behalf of best practices in education was both inspiring and encouraging. The representatives of these entities and the other presenters that they included have been on the front lines of charter schools, and in our shoes, many times before. They have done this not to ‘hurt’ public schools, but to be schools that drive education forward and inspire everyone to examine and implement best practices in a variety of ways.

Scott Marcy, Alan Worster, and I sat through three days of presentations that highlighted the various components of an excellent charter application, various pitfalls of starting schools and ways to avoid them, how to set up an effective business office, how to develop an effective board, and a whole host of other topics.

We were delighted to discover that several of the people we had already identified as ‘people in the know’ for our situation were there, including Peak to Peak Charter School with its high student achievement, commitment to excellence, and the person we had already had a conference call with last January. In addition, we met several new people who are eager to help us make this the best possible situation for our students and families, including the commitment of the League to give us two thorough reviews of our application before submission.

The resounding theme throughout these three days was consistently “This is about the kids.” We can personally attest to the fact that we are not pursuing a charter school just because we can… we are pursuing this because, for this particular group of children, we must. Consistently, the word from these presenters was that this is about filling a need… and we look at each other, and we review the stories of the parents to whom we’re talking and the children we see, and we recognize that call to action.

In Colorado Springs, we need a place that will encourage, support, and challenge students to their personal best, however high that might be and even higher than they suspected! We need a place where every teacher has extensive professional development in how to monitor student progress, address any difficulties, and most of all, move each student higher and higher and higher. We need a place where children have the opportunity to dig their hands deep into ideas, to meet community experts who can inspire them to press on in a particular field of interest, and who can analyze ideas from critical, logical, and creative viewpoints. We need the Academy for Advanced and Creative Learning to be a place of inspiration for advanced, creative, gifted, twice-exceptional and typical learners ready for that opportunity. Furthermore, we need the Academy for Advanced and Creative Learning to be a resource center that supplements the work of other local programs and connects people in need to each other.

And so now… we need letters of support from our community, including local leaders and experts and ‘laymen and women’. We need letters of intent to enroll from families who recognize this as a fit for their children. We need people with various areas of expertise to join us in researching and analyzing the various parts of our application, to join us in writing grant applications, to join us in reviewing curriculum, to spread the word about this program, and in just a few months, once the application process is complete, to join us in transitioning to a board of directors with a variety of professional expertise and with a shared vision for what this school and resource center needs to be.

The representatives from CDE said that CDE employees from other departments have commented on the enthusiasm, excitement and inspiration of charter school ‘folks’. Since we have now entered this camp of folks, we’d have to agree. It was said that application authorizers look for ’skin in the game’… they look for people involved with this process who have children, who have to stare into those young eyes every day… We have that. I hear the questions from parents of children that I teach, we see the eyes of the children we live with, the eyes of parents we meet who have looked everywhere else,  we hear the stories, and we know that this is needed. We know that districts and individual schools are trying to meet a vast amount of needs with limited budgets and are trying to train their staffs, but getting everyone up to speed takes time… and there is currently no local program where every staff member (and yes, we mean even the janitor!) in the building is trained to meet the unique needs of these learners.

We want this program to be not just an academic home for these kids, but also a chance for other schools to catch that inspiration… that regular public school teachers, private school teachers, other charter school teachers can come and see what we’re doing to address the unique needs of gifted, advanced and creative children, and to take those ideas back to their schools and spread that inspiration around a little bit more.

We’re building that fire. We’d love to have you join us.

Nikki