Posts made in September, 2013

Our Meeting With the Lowell School District

Posted by on Sep 19, 2013 in Blog

On Monday Laurie, Dionne, Dave, and I met with representatives from the Lowell School District about our charter school. The following people attended the meeting:

  • Walt Hanline – superintendent
  • Dennis McCallum – chairman of the board
  • Mike Galvin – board member
  • Kay Graham – high school principal

The meeting went very well. We all introduced ourselves discussed our past experiences and then he started talking about having us chartering with them. He and Dennis both believe that the board will approve our charter and they were both very interested in partnering with our group. We agreed that a partnership is the best approach for our students and the community as a whole. I handed out information about our charter, discussed our ideas, and the process of submitting and getting a charter proposal approved. They were very impressed with all of the work that we have done and our ideas on education.

Our plan is to submit the proposal on October 1st. This will be followed up by a community forum and a decision by the Lowell School Board. It was said more than once last night that the vote would be 5-0 in favor of our charter. This is very good news and I’m very confident that we will be up and running next September 🙂

We discussed in detail our location next year. The two options we talked about were using empty classrooms at Lundy or bringing in modular classrooms. Walt is not in favor of using empty classrooms at Lundy. He doesn’t want to pour money into a building that is very old and needs replaced. The modular classrooms would be placed in the empty corner field by the softball field. Dave and I are going to tour the empty classrooms at Lundy on Wednesday to see what it would take to make them useable.

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Status Update

Posted by on Sep 15, 2013 in Blog

With the busyness of the summer there hasn’t been a lot of movement on the charter school. Laurie and Dionne met with the new superintendent of the Lowell School District a couple of weeks ago. He is interested in forming a partnership with our group and would like to discuss our charter school proposal. Laurie, Dave, Dionne, and I are going to meet with him and some Lowell board members tomorrow night to discuss how we can partner together.

Laurie and I met with Dave Rommel last week to review our charter school plans. He was very impressed and likes the direction that we are heading in.

I’ve updated the 2014-2015 budget based on updated information on the ODE web site. I changed the ADM/w LSD Charter label to Per student funding. I removed the ADM/W percentage. I also removed the 85% of funding. I need to do some additional research on how the percentage relates to the per student funding. I also adding a full time administrator at $68,000. This will be our first year operating a charter school and I feel that it is a good idea to set ourselves up for success by having an administrator at the school full time.

 

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