EscondidoEscondido — Classical Academies, a 4,200-student independent charter school in North County, is busting at the seams.
The Escondido-based charter school has a presence across North San Diego, and has seen a doubling in its enrollment in just a few years.
The growth has been fueled mainly from students leaving at a rapid clip from Escondido Union School District — particularly around sixth grade, when kids are entering middle school — as well as a $38 million state bond aimed at helping charter schools deal with facility challenges.
Cameron Curry, executive director of the Classical Academy independent charters in Escondido, said the school has been successful because it offers a wide range of options such as online learning, home schooling and a program in which students attend classes two to four days a week with certificated teachers.
“There are classrooms, but we are about options and personalizing learning,” Curry said. “It’s not a set thing. It’s like a buffet, or track. Some need a day on campus, others do better with online learning.”
“All of of our programs have the flexibility to be in the building,” he added. “One size does not fit all.”
Classical’s growth has gotten the attention of the elementary school district, which has formed a special task force that it hopes will reverse a 12 percent decline in enrollment over the past decade.
“We need to offer parents and kids choices,” said Michael Taylor, assistant superintendent of business services with the Escondido elementary district with nearly 17,100 students. “That’s what it boils down to. We have to be competitive with parochial, charters and home schooling.”
Since 1999, when Classical Academies first opened with 200 students in a building off West Mission Avenue in Escondido, the charter school has expanded across North San Diego County.
It now has serves kindergarten through 12th grade students at campuses in Oceanside, Vista and Escondido.
The school recently announced plans to expand its seventh- and eighth-grade campus along Woodward and Washington Avenues, located just north of the California Center for the Arts Escondido, the performing arts hub that anchors the city’s cultural life.
Over the years, the sprawling charter school has moved its headquarters — or parts of its istrative functions — from a former bank building and offices above a Fatburger restaurant — to its current spot at the former North County Times building at the corner of Valley Parkway and Kalmia Street.
Fewer than two years ago — as it prepared to convert the former newspaper site into a state-of-the-art high school — Classical Academies borrowed $38.1 million from the state’s California School Finance Authority, the first time ever that a charter school offering independent study has taken money from the financing entity.
The money was used to fuel its expansion by buying and upgrading facilities in Escondido and its K-12 Coastal Academy that includes buildings in Vista and Oceanside.
In Escondido, the battleground to win more students is happening in the middle-school grades.
Taylor said he has seen a 7.3 percent student departure rate beginning in the sixth grades in the Escondido elementary district since the 2009-2010 school year. That translates into roughly 1,315 students.
“That’s a lot,” Taylor said. “That’s the first grade of middle school. So parents are thinking about where their kids should go. It looks like they are looking at other options.”
Sue Lanz, principal of Classical Academies Middle School, said the school appeals to families because it offers personalized attention.
“What we see are kids who are transferring because they are trying to escape something, like bullying, they’re way behind in their classes, or they didn’t feel they were noticed or were taught in a way where they were learning,” Lanz said.
The campus is in the process of expanding with three new classrooms as part of an effort to pilot a classroom of the future. It recently forged a partnership with Summit Public Schools, a charter network based in Silicon Valley, and social media giant Facebook.
The classrooms will have big, flat-screened Apple televisions, overhead projectors and intercom systems and are all wired for high-speed Internet, computers and wireless tablets.
The classrooms aren’t for lectures. Content and assessments are delivered online through teacher-created materials, and students receive lessons personalized for them as they move along at their own pace.
“We’ll start everyday with reading a book for 30 minutes,” Lanz said.
Her school is different in other ways as well.
It forces kids to go out for a 15-minute playground break daily at 9:30 a.m. They can’t sit idle, but must get involved with playing four-square, volleyball or ga-ga — a variant of dodgeball that is played with one ball and combines dodging, striking, running and jumping. It stimulates the kids, she said.
About three-quarters of its students are involved in music and arts, and offer two performances each school year at the Escondido Center for the Arts, Escondido — separated only by a parking lot to its north.
Samantha Montes, a 14-year-old eighth grader, came to Classical Academy Middle school because she wasn’t fitting in at Escondido’s Hidden Valley Middle School.
“It was too hard over there,” she said. “I also had a lot of problems. There was too much drama,” she said of friends who bullied her through social media. “People here fix the problems.”
Lanz said that her school is acutely aware of the problems that follow middle school-age kids. The school just began offering “Being a better friend” classes for boys and girls, helping them to overcome cyber bullying, jealousy and gossip.
The classes are aligned with the school’s “Habit of Success” learning standards that it grades every student on. For instance, besides getting an “A” or “B” letter grade in a subject, the child also is given a score of 1 to 4 that measures the student’s attitude. A numeric score of 1 means the student “rarely or never demonstrates” the proper mindset to learn while a 4 shows the student is “above and beyond” the competency level.
“It’s difficult to do this kind of thing in a large school. We don’t have a large bureucracy,” Lanz said. “I have the liberty to try out new things, so we can get better at personalizing things.”
