Edison Charter Academy
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The proverbial final straw was when Senteno and a group of parents on the school's parent teacher committee won a $150,000 state grant to fund a free afterschool program in 2007. But the charter academy's decisionmaking board — composed of pro-Edison parents and community members — wouldn't accept the money, saying EdisonLearning was miffed that the parents hadn't followed proper protocol. "I'm like, what is wrong with you people?" Senteno says. Over a couple of months, she and other parents kept showing up at board meetings and wore them down about accepting the money. Faced with growing resistance, three of the board members left. "I kind of felt it was like, 'If you're so big, you run the school, you be on the board,' so I was like, 'Fine,'" Senteno recalls. She became the president in 2007.
Senteno examined the school's contract with Edison, which had been automatically renewed uncontested by the board in 2005 for another five years. The basics: Edison would front the school's costs and then bill the school. Any "profits" left over at the end of the school year from tax dollars had to be sent to Edison. Senteno estimates this ended up being $250,000 to $400,000 a year. "My feeling was why don't we bring that back into the building and create programs relevant to the needs of our kids?" she says.
The new board started to pull away from Edison, renegotiating the five-year contract down to three, during which the school would pay the company a flat monthly fee and return it only a single-digit percentage of the leftover revenue at the end of the year, leaving the rest for the school to spend as it saw fit. Senteno penned a declaration of independence of sorts to the company in June 2009, announcing that the school would terminate its contract at the end of the impending school year. When Ed Kriete, a vice president at Wells Fargo, succeeded her in early 2010, the board seriously began considering the options: returning to the school district, renewing with Edison, hiring a nonprofit charter organization, or going independent. Teachers overwhelmingly voted in favor of going indie, and the board hired Great Schools Workshop, a now-defunct school consulting firm, to help it shed Edison in February 2010.
EdisonLearning spokesman Michael Serpe says the company doesn't mind schools leaving — it has obviously had some practice, now that its portfolio of around 120 managed schools has gone down to 40 nationwide. "We refer to it as graduating," he says. "Our long-term goal is not to work there forever." ("I would consider us Edison dropouts, but whatever," Senteno rebukes.) Indeed, Kriete says company reps had a very different message. They told him the school couldn't run without them, and that they would do everything to make the school fail. "They didn't want the publicity out there that we can leave their organization and be successful, if not more successful," he says. The doomsday message made some board members jittery enough to leave during the transition.
Still, Kriete, Senteno, and others pushed forward. Finally, EdisonLearning terminated the management agreement in the middle of spring term. The abrupt transition was like a "messy divorce," Kriete says, with Edison's board being the party who'd never handled its own pocketbook. The board hired the Edison employee who'd done the in-house finances, who went to the bank to take out a line of credit and insurance. An Edison rep stowed the company's proprietary teaching manuals in her trunk and drove away.
The school hired Adrienne Morrell, the consultant from Great Schools Workshop, as the new director. Over the spring and summer, she and her staff recruited families at Carnaval, farmers' markets, and school tours, filling up the 540-capacity school to 530 for the current year. For next year, there's a wait-list of 50. The school didn't have to fire any teachers, and the retention rate was nearly 100 percent.
There was one main fight left: With its charter up for renewal in 2011, the school would have to persuade the school board it should be given a second chance.
Leading a school knee-deep in controversy into a new era, Morrell benefits from being an outsider. The fiftysomething Arizona native prefers running shoes and jeans to power suits. She has an MBA's business sense and the education chops of having been a math teacher and administrator in public schools throughout three states for 20 years. On a recent morning in her office decorated with college pennants of her alma maters, she explains her vision for a "community school" with the straightforward manner of someone starting afresh.
She tells SF Weekly, "When parents come and say, 'We hate public schools,' I say, 'Guess what? We are a public school.'"
While Morrell and most charter school advocates say they don't consider charters necessarily better than district-run schools, the comparison is unavoidable. Now that the school no longer has a money-hungry company to blame for any problems, the real test begins: With teachers, parents, and community members calling the shots, can a community charter school teach more effectively than the district?
Last year, the restructuring of a true "community school" began. Community members and teachers formed a site counsel committee to decide policy and budget decisions. Parents and teachers joined the teacher hiring committee to sit in on interviews. A dress code committee decided to keep the uniform, minus the Edison-logo polo shirts. For the next school year, the school extended Thanksgiving break to a week so that students traveling to Mexico wouldn't have to miss days. Parents complained to the board that their students were tardy because of morning traffic, so starting in the fall, the school day will start a half-hour later, at 8:30.
