A Good School = Behavior Contract

A Good School
Can Revitalize
A Downtown

By KANE WEBB
August 30, 2008; Page A9

Little Rock Ark.

Fifth and sixth grades are in the newsroom, middle school dominates the Clinton campaign’s War Room, and seventh-graders have the run of the sports department.

While some cities try to lure athletic teams, mega-retailers or a few large employers to revitalize their downtowns, Little Rock is getting an economic-development boost from an unlikely source: eStem charter schools, which have taken over the old Arkansas Gazette building and is bringing new life to a formerly abandoned part of the city.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/ Benjamin Krain

EStem charter school at the Arkansas Gazette building in Little Rock, Ark.

The Gazette won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958 for its courageous coverage and editorials on the Central High desegregation crisis, but lost a drawn-out newspaper war with the Arkansas Democrat and closed on Oct. 18, 1991.

After that, the Gazette’s building was used temporarily by the Clinton presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, and by an occasional retailer. But for the most part, it sat vacant. Over time, the surrounding neighborhood began to slump as well. A grand, wide-columned building across the street once called home by the Federal Reserve is empty. A building catty-corner from the school — an urban-renewal atrocity that once headquartered Central Arkansas’ NBC-TV affiliate — sits idle too. Before eStem schools opened, you could work downtown and never find reason to pass by the Gazette building. (Full disclosure, the Gazette building is owned by the newspaper I work for, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, which leases it to eStem.)

Now it’s busy enough that some folks worry about traffic jams, as parents drop their kids off and head to work, or pick them up for lunch.

On July 21, eStem schools opened the doors. There are actually three schools in one historic 1908 building: an elementary, middle and high school. The schools’ name stands for the economics of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And their curricula, which emphasize languages like Latin and even Mandarin Chinese, as well as economics and the sciences, are proving to be popular.

This first year, eStem has welcomed 856 students in grades one through nine (the schools will add one grade a year until they offer K-12 education). More than 2,200 students applied for spots, and more than 1,000 are still on a waiting list.

“We have people coming in every day still wanting to get in for this year,” Roy Brooks, the chief executive officer of eStem Public Charter Schools, tells me.

Teachers too, are lining up to get in the door. There is a backlog of teacher résumés, says John Bacon, eStem’s executive director of schools. “We have 54 teachers for the three schools,” he told me. “We had 250 to 300 applications for those spots. And we’re still getting applications.”

One attraction, outside of the quality education, is that the school requires good behavior — students, parents, teachers and administrators must all sign a contract agreeing to follow the school’s principles and code of conduct.

**Here is my question: What happens to the child who signed the contract but still has a problem with their behavior? Is this child sent back to the neighborhood  public school? Part of teaching is helping a child to grow not only academically but socially. If my child comes to your school and their behavior is already good, how are you going to help my child grow? Now don’t get me wrong, who wouldn’t want a classroom full of well behaved students? But by taking all of the well behaved children from the neighborhood public schools, Are teachers in the neighborhood public schools  left with the children who have behavior problems? I just have a problem with this policy that allows charter schools to pick and choose. They should accept children just like the church accepts people, “Just as they are!”