Officials at a new Mandarin language charter school feel their school is being unfairly and inaccurately painted as a villain by the districts it would serve — including West Windsor-Plainsboro.
“The school districts are trying to portray the charter schools in general as being some kind of thief and that we’re taking money away from the district and that the taxpayers are going to get hurt,” said Parker Block, one of the 12 co-founders of the Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS). “The fact is the taxpayers are the ones making the decision.”
According to Block, parents will choose whether they want their tax money to pay for their children to go to PIACS, or to their home school districts — where a specialized curriculum is not offered.
PIACS, which stands to serve at least 100 WW-P students, is defending its program from school officials who continue to lament what they say is a hit to their budgets, and thus, their taxpayers.
Central to the argument against the charter school, at least for WW-P officials, is that the charter school will siphon between $900,000 and $1 million from an already-strapped budget for the 2010-’11 school year. The WW-P school district already offers Mandarin Chinese to its students beginning in the fourth grade. This serves the needs claimed by the charter school to be lacking in the region, district officials say.
But “we have over 100 families already that have basically raised their hands and said, ‘This is a curriculum that doesn’t exist, and we want our tax dollars to be used for our kids in this school,’” said Block. “It’s not a question of the charter school versus the district; it’s really the district against the taxpaying parents within the district.”
PIACS, approved by the state Department of Education last month, will serve the West Windsor-Plainsboro, Princeton, and South Brunswick school districts and will be the first public school in the state to teach students through Mandarin-English dual language immersion. It will also be the first public school in the area to educate students through the International Baccalaureate curriculum framework.
The charter school was approved by the DOE under the fast track application process, which allowed the founders to apply under an expedited timeline for approval. The process allowed for a full period of review by the three districts it would serve. A decision on full approval by the state is scheduled for June.
Block, a resident of Princeton, is the Vice President of Marketing and E-Commerce for Signature Styles in New York City. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in History and Political Science, Block began his career with the Otto Versand Group in Hamburg, Germany.
He worked in various marketing and merchandising capacities for the company in Germany, France, China, Taiwan, and the United States. As the chief representative in Shanghai, China, Block opened a buying office, which became the Otto Group’s largest sourcing operation in Asia. Block is fluent in German and French and has studied Mandarin. He and his wife, Annie, are the parents of two boys.
Block said there is a need for the curriculum the charter school offers, specifically because the generation of first and second graders will be graduating from college into a world in which very different skill sets will be required.
Dual-language immersion for a language, such as Mandarin, is a much more effective method for achieving fluency than the standard time of one hour a day, five days a week, similar to the program offered at the WW-P school district, Block said.
Block added that it takes four to six times more class time to achieve the same level of fluency as a student would need to learn a Romance language like French or Spanish. Block points to the Advanced Placement testing, which, for Mandarin Chinese, includes questions at a difficulty that is much lower than the tests for students studying Spanish or French.
“Immersion is just much more effective when it comes to learning a language,” he said. “Students who are immersed in a second language actually perform better in other subjects in a native language, just like people who take music perform better in math.”
Block said that in many cases, good districts are recognizing that if they want to stay competitive, they need to offer more innovative programs, like dual-language immersion. “The problem is that administrators think that as long as they’re beating the test scores that are being pulled down by Newark, Camden, and Trenton,” they are doing a good job, he said.
And even though a district’s students can perform well on state and federally mandated testing, other tests have shown that American students do not perform as well in math and science as their international counterparts, said Block.
However, WW-P school officials have every right to be concerned about a number of students leaving the district and taking their money with them, said Block: “From what I saw initially, there are quite a number of parents and taxpayers in the district who are voting with their feet.”
“If we had nothing to offer, then parents wouldn’t be enrolling,” said Block. “The state doesn’t grant every single charter that comes before its desk.”
Block said district claims that it would be responsible for paying 90 percent of the per-pupil costs for 100 students to attend, even if 100 were not enrolled, is incorrect.
He explained that the charter school received 100 applications, and the parents who applied for their children have 30 days to register with the school. “Once they register, we inform the district of who has registered, and then the exact number, and only that exact number” would be used.
WW-P school district had argued that the charter school would hurt the WW-P school district, where many opportunities are already offered. On the surface, it may seem like a fair trade: if 100 students head to the charter school, the district is sending the money to the charter school that it would have spent on them in-district. But officials said the money is being sent to the charter school, but the district would still have to fund the same number of teachers and other staff because the students would come from scattered classes. If all the students came from one grade level in one school, it may be easier to cut a teacher.
But, if a few students are taken from the first grade in Town Center and a few are taken from the second grade in Maurice Hawk, the same number of teachers are still required to teach the remaining students in those grades at those schools, they said.
On the other hand, the charter school is able to raise funds privately since it does not receive the same amount of funding on a per-pupil basis as a public district can. And as for the argument that the charter school will take funding away from an already-strapped district, “even when we have a strong economy, they’re not happy with their budgets,” said Block.
Block also said that some of the parents who were enrolling their children in private schools have signed on with the charter school. “Why should it be that only the people who can afford a $20,000 tuition for their students are the ones who get to have a higher standard of education?” said Block. “It should be something that all students have access to — that is why we wanted to make this public. We know that the school districts would never entertain doing what we’re proposing. It’s too innovative.”
