American Charter school seeks to expand

WASILLA — American Charter Academy’s quest to expand its program to elementary students caught the Mat-Su Borough School District Board of Education off guard at its regular meeting last week.

Still in its infancy as a charter school for grades 6-12 since converting from the Meadow Lakes alternative school Mid-Valley High last year, American Charter Academy hopes to begin serving students in grades 2-5 as well next year.

Although ACA’s principal, Becky Huggins, and the school’s Academic Policy Committee had sent a letter to MSBSD Superintendent Ken Burnley about the expansion proposal at the end of March, the board was not prepared to make a decision on what little information they’d received from the school.

School board members want to know how the expansion could affect the school’s original charter and whether the change could affect the $1.5 million School Improvement Grant it received after Mid-Valley High failed to make annual yearly progress a few years in a row.

They also want to know how the school plans to accommodate younger students in its current facility and whether the school’s original mission of helping struggling students would be compromised if high achievers joined the student body.

“Are you assuming that younger siblings of current students are failing in their regular schools and need to go to the charter school?” board member Ole Larson asked Huggins during the meeting.

But Huggins explained her school is not only for students who are struggling or failing elsewhere, it’s simply a standards-based program that some students are finding more success with than they had with traditional classroom methods, especially since launching the new AdvancePath computer-based program last fall.

Huggins said her staff has so far identified 14 younger siblings of current students whose parents would like to send to ACA for various reasons, one of which involves something as simple as transportation.

“We have analyzed the absentee/tardy issue and a re-occurring theme stems around the issue of families with students on different schedules and different locations,” Huggins said, explaining that often ACA students are late or missing altogether because parents can’t get all their children to various schools in a timely manner.

If all children could attend one school, that would help reduce tardiness and absences, Huggins argued.

“For some, attendance is their No. 1 reason for falling behind,” Huggins said.

Huggins also pointed out that families want to start their kids on the standards-based curriculum earlier and this would allow that to happen.

“We call that growing our own,” she said, explaining the school is basing its vision on the Harlem Children’s Zone Project in New York, where it was found that the earlier children enter a particular program, the stronger their foundation for learning under that program becomes. “Including lower elementary grades into our school provides a path for early connections as well as early interventions, if needed.”

Huggins said school officials envision having 20-24 students in one multi-age classroom at the school and that the current enrollment of 195 should not be impacted overall.

Board member Susan Pougher expressed concern that when the board approved ACA’s charter last year, it was with the understanding that the success of the program would be determined over a three-year period.

“We don’t even have the assessments back yet from your first year,” Pougher said. “If you add more grades, I’m afraid you won’t be able to focus on what you meant to accomplish in the first place.”

Huggins said she feels that through the school’s APC board and its outreach to families and other stakeholders as mandated by the charter, they’ve been able to make adjustments along the way and this proposal is another adjustment they’d like to make.

“When we’re focusing on students and their success, I don’t see where we’re watering that down by offering additional levels,” Huggins said. “We wouldn’t move forward if we didn’t have the right teachers available.”

Larson said his main concern is that the proposal was brought to the board without any analysis by district staff.

Board member Sarah Welton wondered if the attendance issue was really what it seemed.

“Is having siblings in different schools the real reason for not making it to school? Were those siblings actually making it to school, too?” Welton wondered.

Huggins said that while they don’t know for sure if parents have been giving them the real reasons for absences, they do know that some siblings are being homeschooled and some are in other charter schools. She said there are about four younger siblings of current ACA students who are enrolled in regular district schools.

Board President Mike Dunleavy said he wasn’t prepared to approve anything at last week’s meeting at Knik Elementary School. He suggested the board gather more questions they’d like Huggins and her school’s APC to answer before the issue is brought back next month.

“We also need a copy of the charter and the salient sections of the SIG grant,” Dunleavy instructed Huggins.

Huggins said after the discussion that it seems to her the board doesn’t fully understand the school’s clientele and that perhaps she needs to educate them better in the future.

“It’s just frustrating when there are so many roadblocks to moving forward,” she said. “It’s not like we came up with this idea in the spur of the moment. We’ve been studying it and we really believe it would work.”

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.