Charting a new course

• By CHARLES LUSSIER
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Aug 2, 2009

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With summer break ending and most students in Baton Rouge heading back to class Friday, families have five new charter schools from which to choose.

Four are in the northern part of the parish and one in south Baton Rouge. Collectively they cover prekindergarten to 10th grade.

One of them, Madison Prep Academy, is a completely new school, albeit a high school extension of an existing middle school, Community School for Apprenticeship Learning, better known as CSAL.

The other four — Crestworth Learning Academy, Dalton Elementary, Kenilworth Science & Technology Middle School and Lanier Elementary ­— are replacements for existing neighborhood public schools.

The state Department of Education approved the charter schools this spring. Their task is to improve the neighborhood schools’ chronically low academic performance.

The array of new choices is creating some confusion.

The East Baton Rouge Parish school system, which until May ran all but one of the five schools, has conducted a mid-summer student registration drive to try to avoid a last-minute crush of new students. In four public forums in July, new Superintendent John Dilworth urged people to register early and not to wait.

In anticipation of more students, the school system is using Lee High, closed in May, to house late registering middle school students.

“We’re preparing as best we can,” said Chris Trahan, spokesman for the school system. “This is a new thing for all parties involved.”

The four new so-called “takeover charters” join four Baton Rouge schools the state took over a year ago. They make up the bulk of what is known as the Recovery School District, or RSD.

“What we’re in the middle of here is takeover charters. They are almost completely focused on getting student achievement up,” said Hank Shepard, chief executive officer of Advance Baton Rouge, which operates five RSD schools, including Pointe Coupee Central in Morganza.

Shepard left his old job with the Algiers Charter Schools Association in New Orleans to take over Advance Baton Rouge. In the process, Advance Baton Rouge broke in half, with a new entity, known as Advance Innovative Education, taking with it teacher and principal training programs.

Shepard contrasts takeover charters with the more commonly understood idea that charter schools are publicly funded laboratories for all kinds of innovation. Takeover charters, however, have as little as three years to achieve a minimum school performance score of 60. Louisiana labels a school below that as “academically unacceptable.”