Like many of the students, the schools, for the moment, could be described as poverty-stricken. The Academies administrators hope to open two more schools on the north side in time for the second semester, but it's unclear if they'll be successful. And in the meantime, some students at the schools that are open were still waiting for computers, textbooks and other supplies well into the term. Classrooms in the basement of the St. Boniface school are divided by office partitions, not walls. "We're operating on a shoestring, there's no doubt," Daniels says.
He says that with full enrollment, the Academies' budget for the year should be somewhere between $10 million and $15 million, and that the funding in place should be able to cover that. But it won't cover the $8,000 per student that Daniels says it costs to educate students properly. The key to the Academies' continuing success is getting a charter, which brings membership in the public school system and full funding from the state.
"Theoretically we can do this indefinitely, but we wanted to do this as a one-year project to show that it can be done, and we fully expect someone to charter us before this year is out," Daniels says.
The roadblock to getting a charter is that the charter school needs a sponsor, and all of the potential sponsors -- the University of Missouri at St. Louis, St. Louis Community College, Harris-Stowe State College and the St. Louis public schools -- have said no. The issue for them is funding.
"The current legislation doesn't make any provisions to pay or reimburse or do anything for the sponsor to supervise," says schools spokesman Chester Edmonds, who says the school district has sponsored one charter school, a construction academy, "because that provides a service that we don't necessarily provide and that the area is in need of."
Though the Academies currently draw students, and therefore some funding, from the public schools, Edmonds says the district doesn't see the new schools as competition. "There are many other private schools in the city, in the area, that parents are able to send their children to," he says. "We're not looking upon them any differently than we look upon any of the other private schools in the area."
And the Academies aren't exactly robbing the public schools of their highest-achieving students. "About 35 percent of the kids that we've enrolled are considered to be special needs already," Daniels says. "The average child is three and a half grades behind in reading and four grades behind in math skills." He says the Academies' goal is to get 80 percent of those kids back up to grade level by the end of the year -- no excuses. (Test results due in late November will be the first assessment of how the schools are doing.)
Spokesman Bob Samples at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a potential charter sponsor, says his university was never formally approached by the St. Louis Academies, but "we made our position known to members of that group."
"We are not accepting or reviewing any applications for charter schools at this time," Samples says. "It's a funding issue. We don't believe we have the funds available to be an adequate sponsor for more than the two charter schools that we currently sponsor."
Faced with these rejections, Daniels and company approached Peter Kinder, who had recently become the first Republican president of the Missouri Senate in a half century.
"Bishop Wooten, Tim Daniels and this group came to see me in February," Kinder says. "I have long made it my No. 1 issue to increase parental choice in education by any means I could, so I said of course I'll help."
Kinder began working on several fronts, helping the group get some national media attention from the Wall Street Journal, and pushing for legislative relief for their charter problem. He's also managed to "expand the universe of sponsoring institutions" for St. Louis charter schools by having Southeast Missouri State University, in his home district, "where I have some modicum of influence," added to the list.
Kinder calls the St. Louis Academies "about the most promising thing I've seen in years in urban education. It's a blade of grass sprouting up through the crack in the concrete."
Words like "parental choice in education" can be politically loaded. They are often tossed around in discussions of vouchers for private schools. But Bourisaw says that's not an issue here.
"We're talking about providing equal opportunity," she says. "Vouchers don't provide the same opportunities for a child with disabilities as they do for a child without disabilities. They do not provide people opportunity. We do provide equal opportunities for all learners, and do take all children. So our goal is to continue that tuition-free. Vouchers should be in another discussion."
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