A New York City group that developed from an education initiative of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed opening four charter high schools that would collaborate with four new district high schools to serve high-need sections of the city.
The New York State Department of Education accepted letters of intent [1] to apply for charters from ReSolve Charter Schools and invited full applications to open the schools for 2014-2015.
The proposal, a partnership with the New York City Department of Education, calls for a network of schools that will “collaborate on academic program development and share economies of scale with regards to operations.”
The schools are proposed for East New York, Brownsville, South Bronx, Jamaica and East Harlem, with a mission to “eliminate the opportunity gap for black and Latino young men and women,” according to the filing with the state. Each of the charter schools would grow to nearly 300 students in Grades 9 through 12 by 2017-18, according to the filing.
Black and Latino students, many living in poverty, are expected to make up the majority of the schools’ enrollment, according to the filing. Also, the co-educational schools intend to enroll English language learners “at a rate at least commensurate with the district in which individual schools are located.”
A fellowship program, backed by the Fund for Public Schools [2], has been created to “bring together a diverse cadre from which the leaders of the news schools will be drawn,” the filing states.
Founding group members include leaders from the New York City Department of Education and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, school administration and education improvement and community development organizations. The group has not previously applied for a charter.
The lead applicant is Dr. Edward Fergus-Arcia, Deputy Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University.
A single board of trustees would oversee the four charter schools to “ensure collaboration and adherence to the mission and vision,” while the four district schools would operate within a single Children First Network [3], which provides a range of support services for small groups of schools.
ReSolve Charter Schools grew out of education efforts that include the mayor’s Young Men’s Initiative [4] (YMI), a “cross-agency enterprise” to find “new ways to tackle the crisis affecting young black and Latino men” in the city. YMI is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Open Society Foundations, founded by financier George Soros.