This week I’m in Washington D.C. for the Parental Options and Information Conference hosted by the Office of Innovation and Improvement of the USDE.  They’ve pulled together Program Directors for our grant (CSP) and other federal grants for either school choice programs or comprehensive school improvement programs.

This morning’s plenary was on parent and community engagement.  A couple of specific/programmatic take aways for me were:

• Texting!  We need to update our Intent to Enroll and eventual Enrollment forms to include permission to text families with updates/announcements.
• “Taste of _____ (school neighborhood” where we invite local restaurants and vendors to host a fair at our school for our families.

A longer, more substantial conversation about outreach to lower-income families echoed concerns voiced at our last school project group meeting.  Minutes from the meeting are forthcoming, but we need to move into the action phase.  We are getting an excellent response from HeadStart outreach, but it’s not yet overwhelming.  Phase II will be churches and radio programming.  Jade, the producer of Sunday Morning Live, e-mailed me and is interested in learning more about our schools.  Woohoo!  Send us your positive vibes.  More from the conference tomorrow.

Amber Simpson, Board Director extraordinaire, attended this year’s MCPSA conference in Columbia. Here’s what inspired her weekend:

From October 16 – 17, 2008, the Missouri Charter Public School Association presented their Second Annual Conference, “Delivering on The Promise”. Aaron North, current Executive Director (MCPSA) perfectly summarized the import of this theme in his letter to the conference attendees:

“The charter school model holds a great deal of promise for revitalizing the public school sector – but more importantly and immediately, it must deliver on the promise of its students. With more charter resources in Missouri than ever before, and more national attention focused on charter public schools and their relevance to the future of public education, we must all work to continually improve the operations and programming in our charter community as more becomes expected of us.”

The ‘promise’ to our students, their families, the community and our nation is to provide safe, balanced, quality educational spaces to help students reach their highest potential. This latent potential, once cultivated, can lead to an ‘educational renaissance’ where students are truly learning, exploring and creating new paths. Charter public schools provide the flexibility in curricular models that address the whole child – academic success, social development and community engagement.

This week I’m in St. Paul, MN for the National Immersion Education Conference and site visits. Today I visited L’Etoile du Nord, French Immersion School in the St. Paul Public School District. Un grand merci à M. Béni who gave us the tour and school overview. We even accompanied the 6th graders on a field trip to a Ronald K. Brown/Evidence dance performance! (FYI, Ron Brown is my favorite choreographer of all time and I hadn’t seen him or his work since we left New York. Quel grand plaisir!) LNFI has translated the constructivist math series Everyday Math and we’ve inquired into purchasing their translation for The French School.

Tomorrow I will be at Lakes International Language Academy, a Spanish immersion public charter school in Forest Lake, MN. LILA is implementing the IB PYP and I will sit in on a kindergarten grade team meeting and hear about the end of their first unit of inquiry.

More to come…