Charters dent public schools
Lure pulls thousands of students
By Allison Sherry, Denver Post Staff Writer, May 01, 2005

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Lobbing incentives and recruiting aggressively, charter schools have lured thousands of students from traditional metro-area schools, sapping tax dollars from district budgets and forcing some principals and board members to consider something new:

How to compete for students.

Charters are promising laptop computers, trips to the East Coast, experiential learning and a fast track to a college degree. Their principals are donning suits and ties and going door-to-door to talk to parents. They are forming partnerships with private developers to build gleaming facilities in new developments where a regular school might have gone, had the charter not gotten there first.

"We know we won't have any kids if we don't do it," said Kay Frunzi, who runs Denver's Wyatt-Edison Charter School.

In Denver, the number of kids enrolled in charter and contract schools has tripled since the 2001-02 school year. In Jefferson County, charter schools now draw 1,200 more students than they did three years ago.

Frunzi goes to churches and preschools and grocery stores. She hangs signs around the Cole neighborhood, where the school sits in the 3600 block of Franklin Street. She has a waiting list to get in.

And because the number of kids drawn into charters has risen steadily for the past several years, school-board members and principals - not accustomed to vying in a market-driven climate - still puzzle over how best to respond to the hard sells that are winning over students.

Ultimately, school-board members say, school leaders will have to push harder to get - and keep - kids in regular public schools.

Statewide, more than 36,000 students attend charter schools, and charter advocates say the number of kids on waiting lists has moved above 20,000.

School officials say charters pose a challenge. For example, in Denver each student is worth about $6,500 a year.

Though Denver Public Schools officials do not track where individual students go, traditional school enrollment has declined by about 4,000 students in four years, while charter and contract-school enrollment has gone up by roughly 4,000 students over the same period.

That said, if the 3,800 new students who have enrolled in Denver charter schools since 2001 were sitting in traditional classroom seats, the district could have an additional $24.7 million a year to work with.

Norma Giron, the principal at Fairview Elementary in Denver, worries about a nearby charter school poaching her fifth-graders. Her school has only 260 students, "and this neighborhood is full of kids," she said.

A couple of years ago, Giron canvassed the Sun Valley area, asking parents what they wanted in a school. Overwhelmingly, the working-class families said they needed day care. So Giron gave them day care. Each morning, though school doesn't start until 9 a.m., she has adults in the building at 7:30 a.m. to watch kids who sometimes get dropped off on the corner.

The nearby charter, KIPP Sunshine Peak Academy, has 207 students. The academy promises trips to Utah and New York City if students do well in school.

"We can't compete with that," Giron said. "We don't have the money."

Theresa Peña, a Denver school-board member and a former US West executive, said she understands that charters have found niches in the marketplace and have responded to what parents want.

"We (DPS) haven't caught up with that," she said. "We will need to give our principals more training and capacity to handle this. Some of them have never been in the business environment where they have to compete."

But in the end, Peña said, a school will survive if it does well academically.

"We've lost customers because our academic achievement isn't there," she said.

Statewide, charter-school students do better on assessment tests. But in Denver, charter students perform more or less the same as kids in traditional schools.

DPS board members considered an idea in February to give principals bonuses for boosting enrollment. The idea didn't take hold for this budget cycle.

Districts elsewhere face a similar quandary, and some are aggressively fighting back. In Tucson, where school officials believe charters have cost them $45 million in the past five years, television and school-bus ads tout public schools. In St. Louis, about 4,000 students have migrated to charters, costing the city's school district about $100 million over five years.

For charters, it's not all about enticing students with free trips and computers. Some are making intelligent business partnerships early.

When Oakwood Homes surveyed homebuyers and discovered that school quality was among the five most important factors in buying a home, it turned to Edison Schools. The for-profit charter company had financial backing and a good reputation to build a new school in the Green Valley Ranch area, said Kelly Leid, who ran the land department for Oakwood Homes at the time.

"They (Edison Schools) got the vision we were trying to sell here," Leid said.

Omar D. Blair Edison School opened its doors this school year with more than 800 students, and it has a waiting list.

Still, the hearts of most students have been won the old- fashioned way: by promising them something they haven't gotten before.

Gus King came home from Skinner Middle School last year ready to enroll at the new Denver School for Science and Technology. After a presentation to eighth-graders, King was most excited that the Stapleton charter high school would feature a cafe and student lounge.

Gus is now a freshman at the school, which checks out laptops to students and starts every day with a morning meeting.

His mother, Linda King, said the school is perfect for him.

"During the interview process to get in, I kept thinking, 'My God, they want my kid here,"' she said. "They took time in the summer to conduct testing sessions to gauge academically and socially where he is. They took a good look at him."

Sarah Jones said her daughter Tera got into George Washington High School's International Baccalaureate program in Denver, but she opted for the smaller Science and Tech charter.

She said she likes the smaller classes.

"I think it works well," Jones said. "They promised a tech- based education. She (Tera) does all her work on the laptop that they give her."

Staff writer Allison Sherry can be reached at 303-820-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com