At Woods Charter School in Chapel Hill, educators emphasize “academics and the life of the mind,” according to Principal Harrell Rentz. Such intellectual pursuit has an equally potent, if less tangible, partner: school cohesion, shored up by a strong emphasis on community, and a “high level of parental involvement,” Rentz says.
For many families, that’s a winning combination. This year, Woods has a wait list of 400 students. The school began accepting 2009-10 applications Oct. 15. “Another 350 applications and counting” have poured in already, said Heather Gallagher, Woods Charter’s admissions director. These numbers should soar higher still: “I would expect to reach close to 1,000 by the end of our enrollment period,” Jan. 15, Gallagher said.
Long charter school wait lists are an increasingly common reminder of the growing demand for these tuition-free public schools of choice. To ascertain demand, Carolina Journal contacted all 97 state charter schools between Nov. 5 and Nov. 12, just as schools were beginning or preparing for the 2009-10 enrollment process. Seventy schools responded to CJ’s wait list queries. One school declined to participate. Two schools with wait lists did not provide specific numbers.
At least 15,000 students are on 2008-09 charter school wait lists, CJfound. State numbers indicate the total is even larger. According to Jack Moyer, director of North Carolina’s Office of Charter Schools, 16,900 students are on charter school wait lists, or were not granted admission because of space constraints. That figure represents more than half of the 31,000 students who attended N.C. charter schools in 2007-08.
CJ data show 57 schools have 2008-09 wait lists. Twelve schools do not, although some had wait lists at the start of the year but placed students as space became available.
For a handful of schools, wait lists are extremely long. Franklin Academy in Wake County has 1,900 students awaiting spots. Pine Lake Preparatory in Iredell County has 1,612 students waiting for admission in grades K-6. Three other charter schools, all in Mecklenburg County, have wait lists topping the 1,000 mark: Children’s Community School, Lake Norman Charter School, and Queens Grant Community School.
Not all charter schools attract intense interest. Some have short wait lists of fewer than 30 to 40 students. Several have a surplus of applicants in some grades, but are not at full capacity. But for at least 24 charter schools, wait lists exceed 100 students.
School officials say the demand for spots is rising at a rapid, unabated pace. Kevin Green, assistant director of Children’s Community School, said, “Wait list numbers have gone up every year,” since the school opened. The school has a 2008-09 wait list of 1,241 students. The wait has not decreased even as other charter schools have opened nearby, Green said.
Many parents flock to charter schools to be a part of their children’s education. Ken Templeton, principal of Union Academy in Union County, said the “No. 1 reason people like to be here is they can be involved.”
Union Academy, with a 473-student wait list, is “built on parent involvement.” It’s “one of the three basic tenets of the school,” Templeton said.
Parents volunteer 60 hours annually, supporting a belief in “school as community, rather than school as institution,” Templeton said.
Todd Havican, a charter school activist whose children attend Union Academy, affirmed the appeal of charter school connectedness. “Parents feel more in touch. … Charter schools are more of a community school,” Havican said. In crowded urban school districts such as Wake and Mecklenburg, students are often “lost in a sea of people,” Havican said. “That’s not an indictment of the public school system.” But it’s easy to feel anonymous when “eight or nine school board members are accountable to tens of thousands of parents,” he said.
Parental involvement serves a practical purpose, too, helping charters conserve limited funds. Though they are public schools, charter schools operate with leaner budgets than traditional public schools and don’t receive capital funding for facilities. At Woods, administrators “bridge the gap with volunteers. … Our parents run the school lunch program. We have one paid person,” Rentz said.
Woods recently entered into a lawn maintenance agreement. Previously, the school relied on a “group of people showing up with lawn mowers,” Rentz said.