Category: Association Blog

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Association Blog

A Valentine to Arizona’s Public Charter Schools

By Matthew Ladner

Hello, Arizona charter leaders! I wanted to send you a quick note to say how very happy I am to be on board at the Arizona Charter School Association, and why I think both your work as educators and the work of the association are so vital. Arizona’s charter schools are extraordinary, and this is about far more than test scores. Far more.

Matthew Ladner

The greatest feature about Arizona charter schools in my opinion: pluralism. Our state is diverse, our families have wildly varying priorities and preferences, and our students possess different aspirations. Arizona charter schools have been at the vanguard of creating meaningfully diverse schooling options. Some Arizona charters focus on the arts, others on STEM, others on equestrianism, others on classical education. Many Arizona charters focus on giving students with troubled academic careers a second chance, others on back- to- basics education. Recent years have seen the advent of charter schools focused on helping students with disabilities.

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Association Blog

New Charter Schools Will Add More than 1,000 New Seats

By Jamar Younger

This has proved to be a landmark year for Arizona’s public charter schools.

Arizona celebrated the 25th anniversary of charter schools with enrollment surging past 200,000 students for the first time, accounting for 18 percent of the state’s total student population.

Charter schools continue to receive high marks in the state’s accountability system while outperforming the state average on assessment test, fueling the demand for more charter options in communities throughout the state.

On Monday, the State Board for Charter Schools added to those options approving six new charter schools, creating 1,082 new seats for Arizona students.

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Association Blog Charters Changing Lives

Arizona’s Charter Law Gave New Life to Neighborhood Montessori School

By Jamar Younger

In 1994, Villa Montessori School was a small, private school with a tight-knit community of educators and parents that cared passionately about the students attending its central Phoenix campus.

However, that didn’t shield the school from financial troubles as it struggled each year to serve the dedicated group of about 60 elementary students and families that valued its unique education model.

Around the same time, Arizona lawmakers were developing a comprehensive new law that would expand choice for all students and create a brand new public school sector that would foster innovation and flexibility in education– charter schools.

With the prospect of charter schools on the horizon, a task force of parents, teachers and administrators from Villa Montessori researched whether the school and students could benefit from applying for a charter.

The group decided to apply and was one of the first schools to receive a charter 25 years ago.

Not only did the charter provide stability for the school, but it also allowed the campus to thrive and grow into one of the top-performing K-8 public schools in the state, with an ‘A’ rating in 2018 from the Arizona Department of Education.

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Association Blog In the News

Arizona Parents Want School Choice and Support Charter Schools. Here’s Proof

By Jake Logan and Nina Rees

Arizona classes are back in session.

For parents of the more than 1.1 million Arizona students enrolled in a public school, it’s hard to imagine that less than a generation ago, the decision about where your child would attend school was made for you, not by you.

Indeed, many of us are old enough to remember a time when school assignment was dictated not by a student’s needs, but by the neighborhood in which his or her parents could afford to live.

In Arizona, that was the reality until 1994 when Arizona enacted charter school legislation. Together with the adoption of district open enrollment, the statutory changes affirmed a simple principle: Parents know best when it comes to picking the right school for their child.

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Association Blog Press Releases

25 Years of Expanding Opportunities for Arizona’s Children

The Arizona Charter Schools Association is proud to commemorate the 25th anniversary of charter schools with a series of blogs examining how charter schools have influenced the state’s education landscape. After a quarter of a century, public charter schools in Arizona are no longer perceived as just a fad: they continue to enjoy popularity with parents and students.

Enrollment in Arizona’s public charter schools has steadily increased since their inception. In fact, new enrollment growth in the state’s public schools is primarily limited to the charter sector these days, with traditional school districts having reached their peak enrollment in 2008 and holding steady or declining only slightly ever since.

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Association Blog

Summer Staff Planning Tips for Arizona Charter Schools

By Tyler McCord
Arizona School Partnerships, Swing Education

Like many states across the country, Arizona is facing both a teacher shortage and a substitute teacher shortage.

Our team at Swing Education has seen the impact of these staffing shortages firsthand: Several individuals on our staff came to Swing from charter schools, and we have daily conversations with current charter leaders about challenges posed by these shortages.

While there’s no single silver bullet solution to eliminating shortage-related issues like combined classes, teachers giving up prep periods, and administrators covering for absent teachers, there are steps schools can take to mitigate their effects. And the summer is a great time to make significant progress.

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Association Blog Charters Changing Lives

Kingman Academy of Learning’s Alumni Return to the School as Educators

By Jamar Younger

Kingman Academy of Learning is known throughout its northwest Arizona community as a highly-rated K-12 public charter school that provides a rigorous education to area students.

For those involved with the school, however, the family atmosphere is just as significant as its academics.

The school’s sense of family has inspired four of its graduates to return to the school as teachers and classroom assistants, allowing them to pursue an education career while engaging in the culture that helped nurture them when they were students.

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Association Blog

2019 National Charter Schools Week

National Charter Schools Week provides an opportunity to highlight public charter school education around our state and throughout the country. The week is dedicated to celebrating the success of our charter students, teachers and administrators while raising awareness of the academic achievement of charter schools and increasing demand for parent choice. You can use the National Charter Schools Week toolkit to promote your school and share your amazing stories.

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Association Blog

Which Cities Have the Highest Public Charter School Enrollment?

By Eric Berschback

There are 554 public charter schools in Arizona, and nearly 200,000 public charter school students – but which cities in Arizona have the most parents and students choosing charters? To find out, we combined the physical address of every school in Arizona with each school’s enrollment figures from ADE’s 2017-18 enrollment file. The result was a city-level view of just how many students and parents are opting for public charter schools.

Phoenix unsurprisingly leads the way in absolute public charter student enrollment. Its 48,000-plus public charter students represent about 25 percent of all public charter enrollment in the state, and 20 percent of all public school students who attend a school – district or charter – within Phoenix. The top 20 cities for absolute public charter school enrollment in the 2017-18 school year are shown in the following table:

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Association Blog

Why Choosing Online School is the Best Fit for Our Family

By Tara Boedigheimer

In 2011, when our son Drew was just two years old, we experienced every parent’s worst nightmare.

We were given the shocking and completely unexpected news, by a pediatric cardiologist, that our precious boy was critically ill with a very rare form of cardiomyopathy–and in need of a heart transplant. It was the only thing that could save his life. Not only that, he needed it immediately and the transplant program at Phoenix Children’s Hospital was very new and not approved by our insurance to handle Drew’s situation.

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