ASK ELi: New Charter School in East Lansing?

This week in Council Capsule we reported on remarks made to City Council by Brian Shaughnessy, principal and superintendent of the Cole Academy, a Lansing charter school. Shaughnessy told Council that Cole Academy wants to open a new school in East Lansing, with about 200 students, and that they are interested in the Bailey Community Center building (formerly the Bailey School).

In response, a reader asked whether Cole Academy is for-profit and where they would find students to fill it, given that the declining population of children in the East Lansing area is one reason the Bailey School was closed as a school. Today’s Ask ELi to Investigate tackles these questions and other questions I thought our readers might have.

First: Cole Academy is a non-profit “public charter academy” and their website shows their annual budgets as well as providing a lot of other information about the school. Rather than repeating what you can read on that website, I sought answers to what I think are unanswered questions by contacting Cole Academy Superintendent Shaughnessy.

Shaughnessy tells me the plan for an East Lansing Cole Academy school would be to start with kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, and then adding grades to go up to fifth grade. Eventually the organization wants to have a middle school and even a high school into which the elementary schools in Lansing and East Lansing would feed.

Where would the Cole Academy find 200 students? Says Shaughnessy, the dropping enrollments in East Lansing Public Schools are one reason Cole Academy wants to move into East Lansing. He says, “It is estimated 200 students left the district last year,” with about half leaving because of the Red Cedar school closure and half for other reasons.

I asked him where he got those numbers and whether he could document them, and he could not pinpoint the source(s). I also wrote to East Lansing Public Schools (ELPS) Superintendent Robyn Thompson to ask about the figure of 200 dropping out of the district's schools and she did not respond. ELi will try to hammer out these stats in the coming weeks.

Shaughnessy says he thinks East Lansing parents looking outside the district will be interested in an East Lansing Cole Academy: “We believe [these] parents are looking for something different. We are targeting that group, as well as Schools of Choice students that already attend East Lansing. We also have additional students that we turn down at our Cole location because we've reached our limits three years in a row. We'll have a better understanding of East Lansing interests when we have our Town Hall meeting at East Lansing in late April.”

When he spoke to Council, Shaughnessy mentioned that the Cole Academy serves many children from families at the lower end of the economic spectrum and I asked him if he would be targeting poorer families in East Lansing for potential students. He confirmed this, speaking to the myth that there is no poverty in East Lansing, and adding, “The bigger myth is that those students can't achieve high standards. They can and will in our school. Experts visiting Cole Academy in Lansing compare our current K-2 students to future achievement levels that will mirror Haslett and Okemos. (Sorry East Lansing folks . . . we'll be doing better on the M-Step more consistently in a few, short years...another reason EL families will want to go to Cole!)”

I asked Shaughnessy why families wouldn’t be better off just going to ELPS schools if they are East Lansing residents, or using Schools of Choice to get into ELPS schools if they are non-residents. He answered, “we are on track to be among the best schools in the State, never mind Ingham County. We firmly believe in a variety of strategies that are well-known, researched and effective. Moreover, we take pride in addressing these directions with great care and with more of a ‘purist’ approach” using “strict adherence to what the NCTE [National Council of Teachers of English], NCTM [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics] and NGSS [Next Generation Science Standards] tell us to do.” He says that Cole Academy has “invested” over $150,000 in professional development for their staff and nine teachers.

I asked Shaughnessy about retention rates for students and teachers. Do they stay at Cole? He answered, “our current K-2 are going nowhere! The transition issues of the past are no longer an issue. We have the same classroom teachers for the past four years.” I asked Shaughnessy what he was referring to as “transition issues of the past” but he did not respond to that follow-up question.

If Cole Academy used the Bailey Community Center building, how would traffic work? Would there be individual cars transporting hundreds of students in and out? Says Shaughnessy, “We currently have no buses, but I could see two buses servicing the Red Cedar neighborhood, based on need. I think it would be premature to hammer out how we'd expand parking, but we'd certainly [seek] input from the community when we do it.”

Details about the date and location of Cole Academy’s upcoming East Lansing “town hall” are not yet available.

When I let our reader who asked the original questions know we’d be running this article, the reader followed up to say she “would also be interested in knowing with the ELPS Sup[erintendent]’s office and the EL MEA [teachers’ union] has to say about the potential charter school.” We will endeavor to find out for a follow-up.