Hope. Change. Choices.

One small step forward:  On Wednesday June 10th Kyle and I headed to Beaudry to meet with Mr. Cole-Gutierez  and Mr. Bravo to talk about some of our concerns with Charters and school choice.  We had a great time, it was amazing to work with the existing LAUSD structure to make substantive change in school access (more conceptual, but moving tangible).  We learned a few new things at our meeting.    1. We have incredible support from the Charter office in our mapping endeavor and our indexing of Charter school information, including admission information and the Charter School Petitions.   2.  Change will happen, it will not happen tomorrow, but it will happen within a few months.  3.  Change will be collaborative, both HCC and Charter Office leaders will be working together to compile Charter School profiles and making that information available to the public using open formats.  We hope to this process next with Magnet schools and eventually all LAUSD schools will be easier to locate and compare.

What do you think are important bits of Charter data that you would like to see in our next map.  We plan to add links to API data, LAUSD report card, and the full charter school petition.  Leave a comment and we will take your input.

We are now at the end of the first year of HCC’s existence. Reflecting on the year’s events and our creed, we have made amazing progress.

Choices we made:

We met our initial goal to promote magnet schools with students at Cochran MS. We are specifically preparing 6th graders to be ready to apply to the most competitive Magnet High Schools as 8th graders. We promoted magnet schools by making videos to explain how to apply and clear up many misconceptions about Magnet Schools. For Charter schools we recognized the problem of simply locating where these schools are and how to apply, we responded with a detailed map that included application information for as many schools as we could find. We replicated our map solution for Charter school with Open Enrollment by listing each school on a map with enrollment information.

Change we saw:

We accomplished great participation with Magnets for our school, we accomplished modest success charter schools and open enrollment.
We saw a change in the organization, our initial success brought us to grow our scope to now include charter schools and open enrollment.
We saw a steady increase in participation from the community and private sector to support HCC and its growing mission.

Hope for the future:

Magnet
The Magnet videos are effective at showing how to navigate the Magnet application process. Even better we can simplify the Magnet application process by creating an online form to match the current Magnet application. Currently only Magnet applications submitted on the official form included in the Choice’s brochure is accepted, no copies, no online method. LAUSD already acknowledges the market for an online magnet form, but is struggling with integrating it with the current Student Information System. Our hope is to create an online form that includes some simple checks and returns a PDF file for prospective parents to print. While we lack the resources to provide parents a direct online enrollment process, parents would be given a pre-checked form. We might also be able to store information submitted by parents and allow LAUSD access to that information when a printed application is submitted.

Charters
Students applying to charter schools continue to struggle with the variety of application dates and processes. We are meeting with the LAUSD Executive officer of Charters to discuss our concerns and hopefully get LAUSD support student access by adding a bit of uniformity to the publication and availability of applications. Think of it as instead of having HCC contact every charter to find out when applications are due, LAUSD will maintain this common public information and we can pull it out to add to our map.

An alternative single application to charter schools similar to the single application used by private colleges, is our second goal for charters. Obviously this is a much more involved effort and will require the cooperation of every charter that chooses to participate. We can reasonably expect to execute on this in the fall of this year after meeting with different charter officials.

Outreach
Promotion of HCC is a big part of our future, while our school enjoyed success, we have yet to reach other schools. Our greatest success, with Magnet schools, corresponded to HCC hosting social gatherings to promote the Magnet Videos and a survey. Our current method of outreach is not sustainable beyond perhaps a few more schools. We need to evaluate how to reach more families.