Sara,
Please help me with this one.
Money for charters...and current schools are closing in the middle of the year??? Fact or fiction?
Is there any truth to the rumor that Homeland Security High School #434 located on Walbrook High's campus in Baltimore City is closing in two weeks??? How can that be? How can the city displace hundreds of kids mid-year and if so, where will they go? If this absurdity is true in the least, please tell me that there is a great plan in the making to ensure that these kids will not get "lost" to the unforgiving Baltimore City streets. I have supported the changes that Alonso has made thus far, but this is drastic!

I am glad the Mayor is putting people to work fixing schools - God knows the schools need the repairs. It does strike me that the list of things being done:

1) Should be done by the school system - they own the buildings and charge these schools rent. Isn't repairing things one of the tasks of a landlord?

2) Are needed in EVERY school building I have ever visited in this system - new windows, ceiling tiles - tour any school and there are issues

3) for at least two of the schools, these are cosmetic issues where real structural questions remain such as issues with boilers which will cost much more to fix.

4) leave out at least one other school I can think of which is a charter and located in a school system building.

But again, my major complaint is why isn't there more money, not that these schools, and the kids they serve, don't deserve the repairs

Actually, the city owns the buildings and the school system pays them rent. But charter schools - why throw additional funding to schools that receive more money than the traditional schools already. What about the schools that don't get private funds like the charters?
Why are we fostering an opportunity to widen an already large funding gap?

Is this what was done with those "gift" cards?????? Seems like a bandaid approach to a very big problem.

Hopeful...still: I've also heard rumors and am looking into the situation at Homeland Security. If there's something to it, I will write a story as soon as I have something concrete I can report.

Sara?!? Just when I thought we could focus on the issues! Heart your reporting 99% of the time, but why tie the funding decision to the Mayor's bogus indictment? The two issues are completely separate and I think it's an unfair intermingling of topics.

Why do I support Mayor Dixon so strongly? Because she does things like this: increase school funding, increase after school programing, sponsor programs that get at the heart of social issues (not just crowd pleasers), etc. If we're not supposed to excuse certain behavior's because of the Mayor's positive influence on the City, then why include any mention of the indictment on a strictly policy-based initiative?

I'm less concerned about ragging on the mayor than I am about bashing charter schools. Didn't we just do that last week or something? The people who made the formulas for fair student funding also figured out the funding per student at charter schools. Given that charter schools don't get the extra funds for the low and high test score students you could argue that they are under funded. And as far as receiving "private funds" - if charter schools are more successful with finding grants, sponsors or fundraising, they earned the money. No one is preventing any other schools from doing the same thing.

Charter schools are environments for experiments. Come up with an idea, make a proposal, see how it works. If charter schools are successful, maybe other schools can try to adopt these ideas that work. They take students from the general population picked by lottery. They have special needs kids. I've got kids in City Schools, both charter and traditional. I don't see it as an us versus them situation.

A Parent:

Thank you for making the point before I did - Charters only get "private" funds if they go after them. I am sure there are other schools that also get grants and gifts and donations.

Again, this isn't about being angry that some schools get much needed funds, rather that ALL schools are not getting much needed funds.

And OTT - that was low hanging fruit:-)

And Baltimoremom - thanks for the correction -yes the City owns the buildings and the Charters pay rent to BCPSS.

Still doesn't change my question

I saw this gentleman speak the other day at the KEI conference in DC. I found this video on youtube where he puts forth a lot of interesting ideas on education.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuWXNzKHNFY

A point was missed in my post. For years it has been stated that Baltimore schools have over $1,000,000,000.00 in needed repairs. The city, the owner of the buildings, has increased its allocation to chools by a little over 1% for the last 5-10 years. So don't be upset if I don't applaud a token gesture on the part of the Mayor. AND to have this go to the new kids on the block seems doubly troubling.

Bill - increased funding for after school programs at the same time a record number of rec centers have been closed.

A Parent - Charters are meant to bring innovation not experimentation. And is has been documented that few if any of the current models are reproductable on a larger scale.

So something innovative is tried and it is successful and because it can't be copied outright (a small nimble charter school has different realities than a city school system) there's no chance for any of these ideas to be tailored and used in individual schools by their newly empowered principals? Wow, that's depressing.

If we are honest we know that things have to change at city schools. Wouldn't it be nice to have some data saying that changes like these have been made in the past and have worked? As schools work towards being more independent and having funding based on the number of students attending they start being very like charter schools anyway. I recall AAA saying at a meeting that he hoped he could empower and fund schools to extent that charter schools weren't needed any more.

BTW, just because these repairs were announced for charter schools doesn't mean that there are no repairs going on at traditional schools. Too slow and too little for my tastes, but that's true for charter schools as well.