STRIVE making strides in class
When Josue Bonilla started at STRIVE Prep Federal in the fall of 2015, he spent a lot of time trying to earn happy-face stickers and string cheese — the rewards for sticking to his behavior plan.
At times, they seemed hopelessly out of reach. One day, Josue was caught playing with a lighter in the bathroom. Another day, he hit a teacher’s aide in the face.
By the end of this school year, the 13-year-old, who suffers from seizure disorders and developmental delays, was spending 90 percent of his time on academics. When a classmate with autism got too close, he used words his teachers taught him: “Please be outside my personal space.” He regularly attended a general-education gym class.
Students and their teachers make breakthroughs like Josue’s in schools every day. But it’s remarkable at STRIVE because until a few years ago, the charter school network, like many others, wasn’t focused on meeting the needs of students like Josue.
That changed in part because of an unusual effort by Denver Public Schools to get its charter schools to serve their fair share of high-needs students. It also changed because STRIVE embraced the challenge, part of a broader “equity agenda” that includes other changes in enrollment and school practices.
“This is about creating the best system for public schools on behalf of communities,” said the network’s founder and CEO, Chris Gibbons. “We believe that requires that charter schools be a part of a system of durable public institutions that are truly creating that value for a community. That is the right thing to do morally.”
Now, STRIVE is seeking to prove that charter schools can sustain high test scores even when they educate students who bring many challenges — a result that’s proven
elusive for others who have tried.
“STRIVE will almost surely be applauded if it has high scores,” said Kevin Welner, who heads an education research center at the University of Colorado Boulder. “I don’t know if it’s going to be applauded if it’s going to be equitable.”
STRIVE began in 2006 and has grown into an 11-school network educating 3,500 students, most of them low-income and Latino. As a charter school, STRIVE receives public money to operate and charges no tuition, and gets the freedom to hire and fire staff, choose curriculum and set school calendars.
The network promises families safety, structure and preparation for college. Students wear uniforms, teachers command attention in the classroom, and the school uses a battery of data to guide its thinking.
Gibbons traces the network’s equity agenda to 2009, when DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg came to him with a request: Would STRIVE be willing to open a middle school in an existing district building as a “boundary school,” meaning it would be the default school for kids who live in that area?
At the time, few charter operators had taken the approach. Prior to his request, STRIVE — then known as West Denver Prep — had followed the charter school playbook of accepting students by lottery from anywhere in the district.
“We had to ask ourselves: ‘As a neighborhood boundary school, are you going to serve all students?’ ” Gibbons said. “That was significant.”
When STRIVE Prep Lake opened in 2010, Gibbons said STRIVE set out to build a school that was “truly of the neighborhood, serving all kids.” That meant the school would take students at midyear and in all grades — a practice not shared by many U.S. charters, and one that STRIVE eventually adopted for all schools.
A year after STRIVE committed to opening the Lake campus, the school district and its charter school leaders signed a “collaboration compact.” The district pledged equitable funding and — crucially — a shot at district real estate. Charter schools committed to improving access and equity.
Like schools run by districts, charter schools must under federal law open their doors to students with special needs and develop learning plans for them.
But historically, charter schools have not educated a proportionate share of special-needs students. In 2011-12, special education students comprised 10.4 percent of charter schools’ enrollment, compared with 12.6 percent in district-run schools, according to the National Center on Special Education in Charter Schools.
In Denver, all schools seeking to open, charter and district-run alike, are expected to offer schoolbased special education centers if asked by the district, said Josh Drake, who oversees special education for DPS.
“We ask schools to indicate their willingness to serve kids not just with disabilities, but with significant disabilities,” Drake said. “There is a right answer and a wrong answer.”
The compact hasn’t removed all challenges. The way Denver funds charter schools often leaves a gap when it comes to the steep costs associated with special education. And charter operators and the district are at odds over whether charter schools should be able to specialize in what kinds of disabilities they support.
Even so, DPS says that within three years, it expects Denver to be the first city in the country to provide equitable access to charter schools for students with significant disabilities.
STRIVE hit that threshold last year, three years after the network started enrolling a greater proportion of special education students than the district overall.
It’s too early to gauge the academic impact of STRIVE’s efforts to serve all students.
On state English and math tests, STRIVE special education students and English language learners typically lag behind the district for being at grade-level. But their “growth” scores are higher than those for students with special needs in district schools, meaning that STRIVE students are covering more ground each year.
As STRIVE changed enrollment policies, it also changed practices.
Students for one period are grouped together in classrooms focusing on math, reading or language development, depending on their needs. And this year, STRIVE launched its first native language instruction program for Spanish-speaking students at Kepner Middle School in southwest Denver.
The equity agenda has prompted deeper soul-searching about the organization’s college-prep mission. If the goal is to serve all kids, is college the right goal?
“We talk about this all the time,” Gibbons said. “It’s an enormously important part of the conversation. We have changed our goals. We have not changed them very much.”
No longer does STRIVE aim to get 100 percent of its high-school graduates accepted into a fouryear college. Now, the goal is 95 percent — “a way of acknowledging that students with severe needs may not be going to college, without lowering the bar generally of what we expect,” Gibbons said.
This year, he said, 94 percent of STRIVE graduates met that goal.
Some charter school critics question whether highly structured models like STRIVE’s can and should serve kids with special needs. Amber Kim, a Denverbased education consultant, questioned how students with sensory integration disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or those who cannot sit still, would fare.
“Compliance-driven models may produce high scores, but they aren’t accessible to students with special needs,” Kim wrote in an email. “Many don’t succeed in such a rigid school and they end up feeling defeated and like ‘bad’ students. They often leave or are pushed out.”
Gibbons said STRIVE has clearly instructed leadership and staff not to push students out. What’s more, network officials said, they are actively working to get entire school communities to embrace the mission of welcoming all students.
“We have a long way to go to meet the promise we are setting out to meet,” said Smith, the network’s chief academic officer. “I have a lot of confidence and optimism that we are putting the programmatic changes in place, that we are putting our money where our mouth is in terms of where our mission is.”
“This is about creating the best system for public schools on behalf of communities. We believe that requires that charter schools be a part of a system of durable public institutions that are truly creating that value for a community. That is the right thing to do morally.” Chris Gibbons, STRIVE’s founder and CEO