| | The Program
Year OneIn year one of the CSP Fellowship, Fellows commit to excellence in several important areas: coursework, school-based residencies, charter application, charter board building, and grant application. Fellows receive a salary from CSP for the entirety of their first year.
Immediately upon acceptance into the fellowship, Fellows begin an intensive summer program that clarifies and challenges their thinking about learning, schooling and leadership. The rigorous program is designed to i mmerse the Fellows in educational philosophy and design while also giving them the foundation in charter school law and operations necessary to begin their school creation work in earnest. The summer intensive culminates with a capstone course that ties the Fellows’ previous personal and educational leadership experiences to the evolving business plan that defines their vision for their charter school.
Beginning in the fall of their first Fellowship year, Fellows begin their school-based residencies. These residencies are designed to give the Fellow authentic and sustained experience with the actual work of leading a school. The stakes are high: the Fellow assumes the role of School Improvement Coordinator at two different charter schools for the course of one year and is responsible for helping the school to achieve measurable growth in student performance during their tenure. To support their work, Fellows will have access to all CSP personnel and programmatic resources.
Throughout the course of the first year of Fellowship, Fellows will travel- first with CSP staff and later alone- to a variety of best-practice charters around the country. These visits are designed to acquaint the Fellows with the broader, national community of game-changing charters as well as to provide examples of excellence that can inspire and support the Fellows’ school design.
In their first year of Fellowship, Fellows recruit and develop board members for their school’s board in concert with CSP staff in order to build a governance body for their school that can hold them accountable for achieving their ambitious school missions. In keeping with charter law, Fellows will interview with their school’s board for the school leader position in July. The decision to hire the Fellow is the board’s.
To reinvent the impositional character of charter schools in the region, Fellows engage in intentional and strategic community relationship building throughout their first year in order that they might build authentic bonds with the families their school will serve. Fellows are charged with marshalling community input and support as they craft their schools in order that the CSP Fellowship can create charter schools that are, truly, community schools, worthy of families’ trust and capable of maintaining sustained enrollment.
To progress into the second year of Fellowship, Fellows must be granted a charter from a MN charter school authorizer and attain grant funding from, at least, the Walton Family Foundation and the federal Charter School Program start-up.
Year TwoAfter their official hire, Fellows will be moving forward with the practical demands of starting a charter school: securing facilities, hiring staff, facilitating staff and board training, enrolling students, and making all of the operational decisions that will determine the degree to which their school is successful in its first year and beyond. CSP will support the Fellow’s efforts and continued growth throughout this second year. Fellows will also participate in the Charter Leader certificate program CSP is pioneering with the University of St. Thomas, completing coursework in school leadership, entrepreneurship, financial operations, and human resources.
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