Charter schools in S.A. expand with a wide range of learning
In middle school, Akeem Brown felt like he had an individualized learning plan. But he wasn’t a special education student.
The adults were interested in Brown’s values, temperament and Brooklyn neighborhood, he recalled. They made sure he could socially and emotionally handle the speed bumps coming his way.
“The sense of community, the sense of power, the sense of respect, affirming the identity of a young Black man, that is what I’m trying to mimic,” said Brown, who at 30 has opened his own charter school, Essence Preparatory Public School, on San Antonio’s East Side.
After a slowdown during the pandemic, five existing charter networks — with widely varying curricula, learning methods and goals — also opened new campuses last fall in San Antonio. More are coming next school year.
BASIS Texas and Harmony Public Schools each opened new campuses on the West Side. Great Hearts opened a campus in Helotes, Legacy Traditional Schools opened one in Cibolo and New Frontiers Public Schools launched its second early college high school, this one next to San Antonio College.
Five more new charter schools are coming this fall, including an early college middle school, an alternative school and a school focused on the classics.
Essence Prep is a network of one. It’s open to all, but the grassroots mission is to serve Black and brown students in a historically underserved part of town and to make them “change agents.”
Classes are designed to let students lead the conversations, with teachers as facilitators. The curriculum includes a focus on public policy.
The name is a nod to Brown’s old middle school, Essence, an “empowerment school” in New York’s public education system that he considers a precursor of sorts to modern charter schools —
marked by innovation and fewer regulations than traditional public schools.
The reduced regulations and the ambitious planting of new schools has been both applauded for the positive effects of competition and criticized as a threat to traditional school districts and an invitation to insider dealing and excessive spending.
But Brown found that in Texas, the ways you can talk about innovation now have their own regulations.
Unique roadblocks
Brown taught social studies early in his career but in San Antonio has worked mainly in politics and local government, as the communications director for then-district 2 City Councilman Alan Warrick and in the city department in charge of Eastpoint, the massive federal grant-fueled “promise zone” that included investments in public schools.
He then worked for the Compass Rose charter network but wanted to start his own school. Brown ran into plenty of problems along the way.
For starters, construction of Essence Prep’s building was delayed when the Texas Education Agency decided that because the charter application quoted author Ibram X. Kendi on antiracism, it ran afoul of a new state law that limits how race and slavery can be taught in schools.
Brown deleted that and other material, but the setback means students this year are at a temporary location and have to be bused to a community gym. Food is trucked in.
“These challenges cost us a lot of money,” Brown said. “And it impacts children. Where I could have spent money elsewhere, and time, I was too busy arguing these things.”
“Removing words like ‘Black and brown’ from the application was insulting, because that describes our community,” he added. “When we talk about opening schools in communities and we can’t effectively describe our demographic, that should be a problem, that should be an issue.”
In its first year, the charter ran into a more common problem — struggles with enrollment and attendance. Brown thought he had commitments from 375 parents. On the first day of school, only 121 students showed up.
“It was disheartening. We made a lot of home visits,” Brown said. “We talked to folks. Some folks moved on and went to another school. Some folks actually moved. There were a lot of evictions going on this past summer that I don’t think we really talked about as a city.”
“Thirty percent of my student population just last year was homeschooled,” Brown added. “A lot of the mindset of, ‘I can just work out of my living room and kitchen,’ we gotta shake that off, not only for our scholars but for our parents, too.”
Today, the school serves 137 students in kindergarten through fifth grade and is on track to add the sixth grade next year, he said.
It had early success securing a $17.7 million bond to build its permanent campus, which keeps Brown optimistic.
“There are folks, investors, who really believe in the work that we are doing, that they decided to take this risk and support us in our very first year of operation,” he said.
“Many charters don’t get to have that conversation. I hope that that shows the strength in our application and what we are doing in regard to instruction and community.”
Early early college
New Frontiers Public School had major success with its first early college high school, named for the late state Sen. Frank Madla, which opened in 2015 on the South Side next to Palo Alto College.
The Imelda Davis Early College High School, newly opened next to SAC and named for a Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce executive who died in 2019, offers college-level classes as early as ninth grade. Students can graduate with both a diploma and an associate degree.
The network had less success with its K-8 school. The TEA ordered it shut in 2021 because its 4-year-olds were being taught by the city-funded Pre-k for SA program without the agency’s approval. New Frontiers moved to sue the TEA but now says the issue has been resolved.
“We decided to realign our entire operations to focus on that early college opportunity,” said the network’s chief operating officer, Jennifer Limas-mota.
Opening in the fall, the network’s Greg Garcia Intermediate School will aim to prepare sixththrough eighth-graders to enter one of its early college high schools.
“It really is going to be the only middle school of its kind, in the city for sure, that is specifically designed to really develop those skills that are very critical for our ninthgrade students who join our early college high schools,” Limas-mota said.
That means degree planning might start as early as sixth grade for some students. They’ll get help with time management and social-emotional support for demanding academics.
“It is a free, public option that is going to be a wonderful game changer for the education community in San Antonio,” Limas-mota said.
In-house alternative
Compass Rose Public Schools, a network that began in San Antonio in 2017, saw students fall behind during the pandemic and will open an alternative school called Impact on the Northwest Side to help them, said Pamela Awbrey, the network’s chief engagement officer.
The school will have two tracks— one for overaged students to finish the credits they need to get their high school diploma and another for those who need extra help but aim to return to their original Compass Rose campus.
“They may have broken code of conduct, but then they can go to Impact within our network, with our leaders, our teachers and with the same foundation of social and emotional supports,” Awbrey said. “As opposed to getting placed in a school outside our system and then we don’t know what happens after that.”
“We don’t want to break their experience” with the restorative track, she said.
Inga Cotton, the founder of San Antonio Charter Moms, a nonprofit group that helps local families find the right school for their kids, saw value in the idea.
“With other charter schools, if there is a student who needs an alternative school setting, they typically have had to leave that charter network,” Cotton said.
“There’s no other charter network in San Antonio that does this,” she added. “It’s like we are working to keep these students in our family, we want to let them know that they do belong, we still believe in them.”
The school plans to open with about 80 to 100 students this fall. Some already attend Compass Rose schools, some left Compass Rose but want to recover credits and others previously applied to Compass Rose schools but didn’t end up attending.
The classics
Valor Schools, a charter network expanding from its roots in the Austin area, is opening a San Antonio campus this fall in the South Texas Medical Center area.
The school provides an integrated humanities program with a Socratic discussion format in the classroom, as it says, to “foster wisdom through wonder.”
“It really sparks this idea of wonder in the students where they really lean in and begin to put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or the author or the people impacted by the texts in that historic time period,” said Erin Fonner, director of marketing and communications for the network.
Several of the network’s founders used to work at Great Hearts, another classics-oriented charter network that began in Arizona but now has six campuses in San Antonio.
“We have a real love for San Antonio. Many of our leaders lived there,” Fonner said. “In many ways we wanted to serve that community and we see a real opportunity. San Antonio is booming.”
The network believes that education’s ultimate goal is wisdom and virtue, which can lead to a full life, not just to college or a job, she said, adding, “We want those for our students, but there is larger scope and a larger purpose.”
The San Antonio school’s headmaster, Mark Discher, stressed that the network welcomes all kids, not just the academically gifted. The school also will emphasize experimental learning, including a gardening program and wilderness expeditions in Utah.
It plans to open with as many as 600 students in kindergarten to eighth grade and plans to add one grade per year to include a high school in four years, for an overall enrollment of just under 1,500.
Valor Schools has two campuses in Austin and one in Kyle. It will open another new campus in Leander this fall, along with the San Antonio location.
Additional traditional
Legacy Traditional Schools, another charter network with Arizona roots, has three campuses in the San Antonio area and will add another in the Alamo Ranch subdivision on the far West Side.
“It’s really a back-to-basics approach to education,” said Sean Amir, the network’s public relations manager. “It’s teacher-led instruction. Teachers are at the head of the classrooms and desks are organized in rows. Students are with their assigned age or grade level and with their teacher throughout the day.”
Parent demand, especially at the pre-k and lower grade levels, drove the network’s decision to open a school in Cibolo in January and to launch the next one in Alamo Ranch this fall, Amir said. The Cibolo school has 600 students in pre-k through eighth grade and a capacity to serve 1,400.
The Alamo Ranch location’s principal, Eddie Woods, worked in the network’s Arizona schools for seven years.
“It’s an upcoming, really busy side of San Antonio,” Woods said. “The parents are really excited. Parents are looking for that traditional educational model where there is direct instruction, uninterrupted teacher. We offer art, music, P.E., Spanish, computers and library as well. We provide a nice balance of academics and rigor and the arts.”
About 400 students in total attend Legacy’s schools on the near North Side, which are undergoing $4 million in renovations and were renamed in 2021 as the Saenz/lee Academy, which has grades K-12 on one campus, and Kelley Elementary.