Schools Bring Opportunity to Both Students and Communities
2 Apr 2007
Public charter schools have not only proven to be a critical factor in helping inner-city students access better education, but they have also acted as a stabilizing effect on their surrounding neighborhoods.
Supporting the development of healthy, successful schools in underserved communities has become a central component of LISC’s strategy. For many children, growing up in urban, low-income and underserved neighborhoods results in educational disadvantages that can hinder success throughout their lives. Public charter schools can provide quality educational alternatives, boost educational achievement and give students and their families the opportunity to take control of their education.
In addition, a thriving public charter school can help its community in other ways. An active school that connects with its neighborhood can bolster pride in its residents, strengthen and maintain its population, provide a safe place to offer health and community services and ultimately act as a beacon, attracting further housing and business investment and development.
Since making its first charter school grant in 1997, LISC has approved almost $60 million in financing to support 80 charter schools across the country with another 60 in the development pipeline.
Nowhere is this commitment more evident than in Los Angeles, where in 1999, Los Angeles LISC made a $10,000 predevelopment grant to Pueblo Nuevo Development (PND), the beginning of $4.5 million in overall support to PND for its schools and an early childhood education center now under construction.
The first of these was the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy (CNCA) Burlington Elementary School, located in the MacArthur Park / Westlake community. This area, one of the poorest and most densely populated neighborhoods in the city, is home primarily to recently-arrived Latino immigrants from South and Central America. With most students falling behind in school due to poverty, lack of English proficiency and overcrowding, PND’s Executive Director, Philip Lance, whose community development work in MacArthur Park initially brought a chapel, thrift store and co-operatively run janitorial service to the neighborhood, turned his eye toward education. "We wanted to create a school that engaged the community directly," he says. "Our goal from the start was to provide neighborhood children with a quality education in a safe and positive school environment.”
With financial and technical support from LISC and ExED, a non-profit charter school support organization, PND converted an incomplete mini-mall, once a target for vandalism, into the CNCA Burlington Elementary campus. The school encourages and requires parental involvement and focuses on English language proficiency. Since opening in 2000, the school has become the cornerstone of the block. Its design, which features innovative adaptive reuse and colorful design elements, makes a strong visual statement of revitalization. In 2003, Burlington Academy received the prestigious Rudy Bruner Gold Award for Excellence in the Urban Environment.
LISC has continued its successful partnership with PND over the years, helping it to expand its educational reach to serve more than 1,400 students from kindergarten to high school in three Camino Nuevo Charter Academy schools, operating at four separate facilities in the MacArthur Park / Westlake community. When PND purchased a second site on the same block as the Burlington Elementary School to create the Burlington Middle School, Los Angeles LISC provided PND with a $116,000 operating support and planning grant—funded by The California Endowment— to develop a family center and health clinic within the Middle School. Working with PND and ExED, Los Angeles LISC and LISC’s Educational Facility Financing Center were also instrumental in securing and financing a new facility for the Camino Nuevo High School, which began operation in 2004 in a temporary location and moved to its new facility in November 2006.
Los Angeles LISC has replicated this successful model of collaboration with community and educational organizations repeatedly over the past ten years, making available almost $24 million in financing for 33 schools that have provided quality educational opportunities for California’s children.
These public schools have not only proven to be a critical factor in helping inner-city students access better education, but they have also acted as a stabilizing effect on their surrounding neighborhoods. By creating charter schools in low-income communities and engaging them with the greater neighborhood population, these schools can help to act as institutions of change and empower the residents and children they serve.
For more information on LISC’s Charter School work, visit LISC's Education Facilities Financing Center (EFFC) online at: www.lisc.org/effc and Los Angeles LISC at www.lisc.org/los_angeles. For information on Camino Nuevo Academy, visit www.caminonuevo.org.
Note:
This article is an excerpt from LISC Link, our quarterly print newsletter. The current and previous issues are available for downloading at: www.lisc.org/section/media/newsletter/
Article Type: News