On Monday September 13th, Highland Park Elementary, Rhodes Middle School and Travis Early College High School submitted their Internal Charter School applications to the district.
Last August, the San Antonio Alliance won the $150,000 Innovation Fund Grant through AFT. A total of 126 local unions nationwide submitted proposals and only 7 won. The San Antonio Alliance was the only union in Texas to win funding.
The Alliance's goal with the Grow Our Schools Innovation Fund Grant is to assist in growing student enrollment in the central city district and to improve student learning. The San Antonio Alliance and the SAISD are using the challenge of declining student enrollment as an opportunity to think differently about how to engage school staff, parents, and the community in improving student learning while also increasing enrollment.
Throughout this past school year, the San Antonio Alliance held two conferences. In February, the Reinventing schools, Unleashing Creativity, Internal Charter Schools Conference was held for schools interested in learning more about the internal charter process. In May, the Marketing Your School Conference was held for current and prospective internal charter schools to learn more about marketing their charter as an individual school. In addition to technical support, several meetings with schools working on becoming an internal charter were scheduled as well throughout the process.
If approved by the school board to become internal charter schools, the campuses that submitted their applications will become neighborhood schools that will have the potential to draw students from outside of their attendance boundaries and outside of the district due to their focused instructional programs.
Presentations to the school board and approval are scheduled at the October 18th school board meeting.