The
School Charter Plan:
2. UNIQUE ASPECTS OF THE PROPOSED CHARTER SCHOOL
2.1 Unique features of the Charter School Proposal
2.1.1 Family and Community Oriented
2.1.2 Personalized Learning
2.1.3 Integrated with it's Rural Environment
2.1.4 K-12 Continuum
2.2 Unique Features of the Enrollment Area
2.1 Unique
Features of the Charter School Proposal
2.1.1 Family and Community Oriented
Historically, public schools
have not been places that invite a strong, active, sustained interaction
between the educators who work within them and the family and community members
who actually build and maintain them.
Indeed, as schooling grows in size and sophistication, the interaction
with families and community members becomes more carefully defined and
circumscribed. In contrast to this
separateness, the SVRCS will operate from the premise that parents bear the
ultimate responsibility for their children’s education, and that a school
should be both a community unto itself and an interactive component of the
larger community in which it exists.
Said differently, a school should be a place that actively interacts
with its community and vice versa.
The overall success of this
charter school will rest heavily on the active and routine involvement of
parents and community members. To help
insure this success, the SVRCS’ Home/School Contract (Section 8.4, page 75)
will serve as the vehicle through which students, parents, teachers, and
community members commit themselves to the school’s overall mission. All parents will be required to take part in
the operating of the school and all community members will be welcome within
the school and encouraged to voluntarily participate in its operation. Through mentoring in particular, parents and
community members will foster strong family/community relationships with
students. In time, programs such as a
pre-school, after school activities, day care facilities, a computer learning
center, and adult education courses may be developed to stress the school’s
strong belief in life-long, community-centered learning.
The SVRCS will be the hub of the
community. The people of Sugar Valley
would routinely use the facility for community events and various school
fundraisers. Parents and family members
of students from other communities would join in the feeling of belonging as
students family members and Sugar Valley residents come together to celebrate
the graduations and success of SVRCS students.
The social and interpersonal familiarity promoted by such a “small town”
setting will support important cultural norms, including care and concern for
all of the school’s students.
The Sugar Valley community will
serve as the geographical, social, and cultural contexts for creating a
community of learners within the SVRCS.
All significant decision making aspects of the school, ranging from its
Board of Trustees, Community Relations Committee, to its varied programs such
as MASH (Many Active School Helpers), HELP (Holistic Education Learning Plan),
and CAM (Client Advisory and Mediation) represents the involvement of parents,
students, school personnel, and community members. Students will be understood as important
members of the SVRCS learning community and, as much, important within the
broader Sugar Valley community. SVRCS
will provide learning that prepares students for life outside the community,
but more importantly for life inside the community.
2.1.2 Personalized Learning
With the increasing size and
bureaucratic complexity of consolidated schools comes an increasing emphasis on
their institutional nature. The more
institutionalized schooling becomes, the more impersonal it inevitably must
be. The institution, and its
professional workers, literally loses sight of all but the ‘best’ and ‘worst’
students within an ever-expanding student body.
The SVRCS will make certain that no student gets lost in the crowd.
The SVRCS upholds the conviction
that every child has special needs, particular gifts, and unique talents and
abilities. Thus, it will help students
to work well in all areas and to concentrate their energies in those areas in
which they excel through its reliance on the HELP process. The HELP document - a personalized learning
plan for each student - functions as the center of the SVRCS mission. Operating from the premise that each student
has unique talents and abilities to be nurtured and encouraged, HELP will
enable parents, students, and teachers to determine the best ways to achieve
their goals and expectations for themselves and the student, and to adapt their
efforts to changing circumstances.
Fundamental to these efforts is
the belief that education should focus on the individual and that, with
appropriate and ongoing support, instruction, and care, each student can
eventually take control of shaping and directing her or his own learning needs
and directions. Such self-motivated and
increasingly self-directed education is the results of genuinely personalized
learning. Efforts toward genuinely
personalized learning will include evaluation based in part upon standardized
testing and ongoing observations by school personnel. Prescribed benchmarks of achievement to
accomplished passage from one level to the next will be documented to the Help
component. Portfolios, formal and
informal instruments, and rubrics will be a vital element in the evaluation
process. Rubrics, guidelines for
assessing performance against criteria, will assess all dimensions of the task
or content under evaluation. Rubrics
used will scale expectations for content or performance levels to achieve
novice to exemplary standards. Students
will be apprised of the guidelines in advance to allow for self-assessment and
self-adjust between their own individual performance and their own aspirations.
Regular assessments and feedback
will detect problems or difficulties and address them before the child goes
forward. Parents and their student(s)
will meet at least annually with a small panel which includes the child’s
teachers to decide on what needs and desires the student has and what type of
classes and experiences might be most appropriate for the coming year. Designing of future educational programs will
take into consideration benchmarks established in our K-12 curriculum.
The SVRCS will operate around
nine week mini-courses so that students with differing needs and interests can
participate based of their abilities.
Traditional grade levels (1st, 7th, 11th, etc.) would be flexible when
necessary so as to allow for a more personalized and diverse education program
with students of differing age groups inter-mingling based upon individual HELP
plans. Moreover, each student will
receive staff tutoring in order to make the learning process more personal and
more supportive. Additionally, each
student will both have and do peer tutoring in order to engender to spirit of a
true learning community.
2.1.3 Integrated with its Rural Environment
Despite its largely rural
nature, Pennsylvania has directed much of its educational efforts and resources
toward consolidation, locating ever-larger school “plants” in more densely
populated urban and suburban locations.
In contrast to this pattern, the SVRCS includes the term
"rural" within its name not only to reflect the location of the
school but also to recognize the many unique opportunities a rural area can
provide to students' education. SVRCS
will be the first rural, community oriented charter school in Pennsylvania.
The SVRCS will promote
a clear strong sense of rural environmental stewardship through such practices
as outside/open classrooms and hands-on learning. These are possible within a valley whose
natural environment includes farms, forests and waterways that offer direct
opportunities for learning related to local operations that include a fish
hatchery, forestry operations, a meat packing business, and several
sawmills. Sugar Valley's rich rural
history, including one of Pennsylvania's few remaining still used covered
bridges, a one-room schoolhouse, and a grist mill, locates the school within a
unique geographical context for integrating academic and culturally geographic
knowledge.
The rural area of
Sugar Valley has many important features to offer the charter school, not the
least of which are opportunities in Agricultural Science and Forestry. The curriculum offerings within the SVRCS
will include both explicit community-based courses and more traditional courses
within which community-based knowledge and experiences are integrated. Students with an agricultural background will
be encouraged to combine academic knowledge with their real life experiences
through school-organized partnerships with area farmers, agribusiness, and
ag-production facilities. Students with
other backgrounds and interests will also be directed toward community-situated
learning opportunities, including the community owned and run cable television
companies, landscaping, utility operations and service organizations (Lions,
Sportsmen, etc.).
Among other things,
rural communities reflect a culture that respects natural resources,
appreciates history, and values neighborliness.
By highlighting the interrelationship between the SVRCS and its
community, both can continue to thrive.
By celebrating rural life and culture within the larger context of and
increasingly fast-paced, sophisticated, and technological national environment,
the SVRCS will enable students to develop a strong "sense of place"
rooted in long-standing rural values which include caring, commitment and
common sense.
2.1.4 K-12 Continuum
Perhaps the most unfortunate
result of formal schooling is the way in which it successfully teaches students
to deconstruct themselves as learners and the learning process itself. Students learn to measure progress by grade
placement (first, second, ninth, eleventh, etc.), to determine their competence
by test results and grading practices, and most sadly, to understand knowledge,
skills, and dispositions according to subject areas (mathematics, geography,
etc.). In addition to this successful
compartmentalization of learning, the ways in which schools physically
differentiate actual location with learning (pre-school, kindergarten, elementary,
middle school, etc.) causes the students literally to relocate during their
schooling years. It should come as no
surprise that so many students have a difficult time translating their life and
learning in school to the life and learning after school.
The SVRCS represents the belief
that all forms of learning, bases of understanding, and abilities to take
action are a continuing process that must be nurtured carefully and
respectfully throughout the time one spends in school, and that this nurturing
must be shared by everyone within a supportive social environment. Toward this end, the SVRCS will begin
operation as a K-12 learning center.
Such a school provides students with the opportunity to mix with differing
age groups both within and outside of formal learning situations. Older students become models for younger
ones, peer tutoring becomes a matter of course, and familiarity becomes a “way
of life“ which works to strengthen and support not only teaching and learning,
but also the overall interactions of everyone within the learning community.
The K-12 continuum promotes a
sense of belonging, which not only works to engender formal learning, but to
strengthen an overall sense of community.
A strong sense of community leads, among other things, to feelings of
shared responsibility among everyone involved and to diminished behavior
problems. The familiarity resulting from
this continuum allows students to develop confidence in themselves as learners
who can participate in directing their own learning. By the time students reach the upper grades,
they can stretch their education beyond the physical location of the SVRCS
(e.g., for classes offered elsewhere) with the knowledge that they will always
have a complex support base (teachers, parents, and peers) available to them at
SVRCS.
The ability to learn, to be
curious, to identify and solve problems, to participate meaningfully in one’s
community - these are not merely goals for school students but literally goals
for life. The SVRCS will operate as
though learning is tantamount to living and, as such, need not be restricted by
institutionally determined structures such as “school subjects” time limits,
age-grading, and the like. In other
words, SVRCS students will be expected to develop a way of life, which
acknowledges the importance of others as it revolves around the enthusiasm,
mystery, struggle and functional relevance associated with learning.
2.2 Unique
Features Of The Enrollment Area
Sugar Valley Area School (SVAS)
served grades K-12 in one building from 1955 until 1996 when the Junior/Senior
High School (grades 7-12) section was closed to form a consolidated school in
Mill Hall, PA, sixteen miles away. As a
unified learning center, the SVAS provided unique education and socialization
opportunities for students, parents, and other community members. Since SVAS’s partial closure, only three
single-facility K-12 programs still operate in the Commonwealth. (See 2.1.4)
Sugar Valley’s public schools
have a history of over 150 years of academic excellence built upon a strong
core curriculum and extensive extracurricular activities. Prior to its closure, the Sugar Valley
Junior/Senior High School provided an exemplary model for other schools by
maintaining 0% dropout rate; consistently exceeding state averages on standardized
assessment tests; and producing regional, state and national place winners in
band, chorus, sports, 4-H and FHA programs.
Other schools in KCSD and surrounding school districts have relied on
Sugar Valley’s unique rural setting to provide Vo-Tech training in Agriculture
Science and Forestry. (See 2.1.3)
A 1995 assessment of
the Sugar Valley High School by the Middle States Association Commission on
Secondary Schools highlighted the strong relationship between students,
teachers, and the community, which served as a conduit for student
success. The assessment states, “The use
of the school by the community is supported and encouraged by the school staff
and administrator.” In the School and Community Report, Sugar Valley School was
referred to as the heart of the Sugar Valley community. “The mutual respect and support demonstrated
by the school and community was evident throughout the Committee’s visit. This strong bond is a key factor in making a
K-12 organizational plan work, as well as maintaining a family atmosphere which
ensures an education environment relatively free of violence and drugs.” The
report also stated, “There is a pleasant and positive attitude combined with a
sense of pride permeating the climate of the school. In addition, there is a genuine interest in
helping students achieve to the best of their ability. The school atmosphere and structure thrives
through mutual respect, flexibility, creativity and a willingness to work above
and beyond the call of duty.” (See 2.1.3, 2.1.4)
Upon the closure of
SVAS’s Junior/Senior High School section, over 30% of the secondary students
chose to participate in alternative education including home schooling,
enrollment in private schools or living with relatives in other school
districts. Contacts with those students’
parents indicate that they would actively participate in and support a charter
school in Sugar Valley.
The SVRCS will be the
first rural, community oriented charter school in Pennsylvania, offering a
comprehensive program with four unique features. All teaching and learning at the SVRCS will
be guided by a set of values and principles that reflect American ideals:
Liberty, equality, individuality and community.
(See 2.1.1, 2.1.3)
Reference: Commission on Secondary SchoolsMiddle States
AssociationReport of the Visiting CommitteeSugar Valley High School
- April, 1995