 To think tech on OC-16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii, I'm Marianne Sasaki. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show this time, we'll cover talk by Buffy Cushman-Patz, the principal of a unique local charter school. She gave us an inside look at the current status of charter schools in Hawaii, their politics and their future. Buffy took a master's in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2012. As an educational activist and a leader of one of the most advanced charter schools in our state, Buffy is uniquely qualified to tell us about the world of charter schools. She is the principal of a charter school called SEACS, S-E-E-Q-S. Its official name is the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability. SEACS is in Kaimuki. It's a secondary public charter school and was founded in 2013. These days it serves some 150 students in grades 6 through 8. It offers an interdisciplinary project-based, community-based, tuition-free, secondary school experience for Oahu families. The SEACS program integrates core learning and math, science, social studies, English and the arts with project-based experiences that allow students to make use of what they have learned in real life situations. It's a very unusual school in bristles with educational creativity. Buffy's passion is teaching through the lenses of theory, policy and leadership and her on-the-ground experience as a teacher in both conventional and unconventional settings. Buffy got her principal's license while serving on the leadership team of Neighborhood House Charter School in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In 2010 to 2011, she had an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship at the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs of the National Science Foundation in Washington. Prior to her fellowship, Buffy taught math and science in public, charter and independent schools in Hawaii. Her training included a Master's in Science in Geology and Geophysics from the University of Hawaii at Minoa and a Bachelor of Science in Geology from the University of Florida. Buffy volunteered with Teachers Without Borders in 2008 and 2010, leading math and science workshops for teachers in South Africa. After an introduction by Arke Kale, Vice President of Activities of the Harvard Club, Buffy gave us a well-informed and spirited report on the status and problems and prospects of charter schools in Hawaii. How many of you went to public school? How many of you went to private or independent school? How many of you went to a charter school? Some of us are too old to have gone to a charter school because charter schools haven't been around for all that long. So the next question is really, what defines a public school in your mind? I don't actually mean what characterizes, but what defines? What goes into making something a public school? Funding. Funding. Tell me more about funding. Usually it's funded by a state government or a local government or school district. Government funding, yeah, public. That's one of the characteristics of public. What else defines public? Not selective. Not selective. Anyone can go. What else defines public? Don't worry, I've got the answers on my next slide, so if you don't want to add any more. And it's free. Free is an important characteristic of public schools. Are charter schools public schools? Yes, they are public schools. So here's what defines public schools in my mind, and this is part of why I started with this, because it's actually a common misconception about public charter schools. Public schools, there's no admissions criteria. Anyone can go. It's tuition-free. That's another way of saying free, but sometimes people ask, what's the tuition? It's free. It's a public school. In the U.S. these days, public schools need to be driven by common core standards. I'm going to leave lots of time at the end for Q&A, so if you want to ask me about common core standards, I'm happy to pontificate on those, but that's one of the characteristics of public schools, especially in Hawaii. And also our students have to take state mandated tests, so they have to take the Hawaii State Assessment, now known as the Next Generation Assessment. And it also means that we serve all students, including those with IEPs, or in the special education program. These are the characteristics of public schools. Charter schools are public schools. In Hawaii there are two varieties of charter schools. Anybody know what those are? The Hawaiian immersion is, I thought I might confuse things by actually, there's lots of different varieties actually, but if I'm going to characterize it in two broad areas, start-up charters and conversion charters. So start-up charters are charters that originated as an idea. Like we, I have an idea for a school, I want to make this happen. A facility is not provided to start-up charters because basically it's, here's an idea, I want to make this happen, go find a space. This is in Hawaii. This should be public charter schools in Hawaii is what I'm characterizing right now. Although I will soon draw some distinctions between charter schools in Hawaii and charter schools on the mainland, as they're typically perceived. So start-up charters, a facility is not provided. There's no geographic priority for students. So they can come from anywhere in Hawaii if you're a start-up charter. And there's an enrollment lottery if there's more interest than there is available space. That's another characteristic of start-up charter schools. Does anybody, can anybody name a start-up charter in Hawaii? Seeks is one, I'll go ahead and give you that one. Seeks is a start-up charter. Anybody know any other start-up charters in Hawaii? Voyager. Voyager is another start-up charter. Voyager Public Charter School. It's an immersion that's in the Kiki Valley. Halau Kumana. It's all about the name of it. Halau Kumana. It's not immersion, but it's Hawaiian focused. Yeah, but that one's another start-up charter, yep. UH Lab. UH Lab. UH Lab's actually its own variety practically because it was its own school first, and then they, they're kind of somewhere a hybrid between these. But UH Lab is a charter school. There's Kanuoka Aina on the Big Island. There's some of the ones you may have heard of in the news. Halau Lokahi was a start-up charter school. Myron B. Thompson is a start-up charter school. There's, there's actually 35 charters in Hawaii, and I think about 30 of them are start-up charters. So then there's a, then there's conversion charters. Oh, I forgot to mention the most important part, that charter schools, public schools, they're publicly funded. Reality is they're publicly underfunded. Do they receive a different amount for students than public schools? And DOE public schools? Yes, significantly different. So the actual amount that I get to run my school right now, my per-people funding, it comes on a per student basis, $6,700 per student per year. Compare that to what you might pay to go to Punahou, Iolani, Lapietra, any of those schools. Those are on the order of $20,000, and then they'll ask you for more money. In addition, it's part of their annual fund. We get less than $7,000 to run our school. And reminder, facility is not provided. So that actually, Brent comes out of that less than $7,000 per student. So it's a little bit hard to actually compare apples to apples because in the DOE budget, they have their budget for running their schools, and then the facilities budget is actually a different line item of the state budget. But DOE schools, depending on, actually looking at the superintendent's report that she shared at the Board of Education recently, about $12,000 per student is what they were estimating. And our reality is it actually costs about $10,000 per student. I could run my school on $10,000, I run my school on $10,000 per student, and I just fundraise the difference. Then conversion charters, anybody know a conversion charter? Yep, that's right, yeah, originated as a DOE school. Ish, yeah, UH Lab mostly counts as that. YLI is a really common one that folks know about. YLI Public Charter School, also Lanikai. Lanikai was a DOE school as well that converted. It remains in a DOE facility. So they have a little bit of an advantage in that way. They get to keep their building. They said, we want the freedoms of charter schools in terms of how to run their school. And so they got the authorization to become a charter school, but got to keep their facility. They also serve students in their geographic area first. So for example, YLI, which is three blocks from Sikh, so it's our close partner for us. YLI serves all the students in the Kaimuki area first. And then if there's additional space, they have students that can enroll with a geographic exemption by lottery. So there's that parallel there that they have the lottery for the extra spots. So when they convert it, did they get their funding we used for $7,000 in the first one? Yes, yeah, yeah. So basically it's actually an entirely separate line item in the budget. We don't get our funding from the DOE for charter schools. We get our funding from the state. So it's a total different, and the state funds the DOE, and the state funds charter schools, and the Charter Commission doles that out to all the individual schools on a per pupil basis. It's probably somewhat easier if you're building to provide it. They're not having to pay for the building out of that $7,000, are they? And no, plus the facility, right? Right, yes, yes, these folks, my close friends and allies, they know they have a little bit easier funding wise, situation wise. We're all in the same boat in terms of it's still not quite enough money to run a school. Right, forget that it most important last bullet. It's they're publicly underfunded as well. But as you mentioned, they are funded from state government sources in Hawaii. That again, Hawaii's different in the sense of we have our one. We don't have local school districts. We just have our one school district for the state. A lot of times people hear the word charter schools and sometimes they get their hairs up. I do too sometimes actually. Charter schools have a negative perception in some places for various reasons. On the mainland, and I'm gonna give some generalizations. Every state's charter law is different. So they're not all the same. But if I give some generalizations about mainland charter schools, they're operated by non-profit or in some cases for-profit organizations. There's some states that allow for-profit organizations to run schools that then get public funding. It sounds a little crazy to me, that for-profit part of it. But even the ones that are legit are non-profit organizations. In Hawaii, charter schools are state agencies. So we're not non-profits and we're not for-profits. We are actually, each individual school is a state agency. Which has its benefits, like insurance, and payroll benefits. Those things come with being a state agency. But it has its challenges too, in the sense, well, I can get to that once we get to that. Most charter schools are characterized by having teachers that aren't unionized. And this is sometimes a critique of charter schools. Again, I'll preview what's over there. In charter schools in Hawaii, all of our teachers are part of the HSTA. And in the mainland, charter management organizations known as CMOs, they run multiple schools or networks. So you may have heard of KIP charter schools, or you may have heard of Expeditionary Learning. Those are completely varied on the pedagogical scale. Like one is a really progressive and one is a really sort of kill-and-drill model. But basically, you have these organizations that run a lot of different schools under the same model. So it's almost like a country-wide district because they're running the same model in various places. We don't have that in Hawaii. And so in Hawaii, as I mentioned, our charter schools here are operated as state agencies. So I am the executive director of a state agency. It's fascinating for me to think about sometimes. All teachers are part of the HSTA. They don't have a choice in it. They're all part of the HSTA. And our schools all have individualized missions and vision. So there are 35 charter schools in the state of Hawaii right now. We don't have any CMOs. We don't have anyone that's all that's, I mean, maybe someday we'll have CICS Honolulu, CICS Ewa Beach, CICS Maui. We might someday have an organization that would run multiple schools. But right now, there really aren't any parallel organizations like this. We were authorized by the new Charter School Commission in December 2012. And then we had our first classes in August 2013. There was a really short window between when we got authorized and when we started, but we were basically the same age as the new Charter Commission. The new Charter Commission was coming into being right at the same time that CICS was coming into being. So we were sort of running parallel tracks there. Now, here's us this year, first day of school this year. 2015, 2016 school year, we have 150 students and about 20 faculty and staff. We have these support groups. So I was mentioning that every school has its own governing board. We have a governing board. We also have our CICS Foundation, which has a board. And then we have our CICS Ohana, which is our parent group. Actually, a plug for our CICS Ohana. We're having a big Earth Day event this Saturday, 12 to 4 at KCC. And it's crafts and games and tie-dying and old t-shirts and upcycling of t-shirts in the bag. So these all have different missions, right? This one is the fun. They'll raise a little bit of money, but it's the fun, the community building. The governing board really has that task of overseeing us financially. I report financial statements to them every month. And our academic oversight, they're making sure our test scores are okay. And then our organizational, are we following state laws when it comes to how we keep records and those kinds of things? Moving into the pedagogy now, a little bit away from the structures. But our school was founded on five core principles. First is that real world situations and real world contexts enable real world learning. Our second core principle is that learning occurs when learners take ownership of their learning. The third is that everyone's a teacher and everyone is a learner all of the time. I think as parents and just adults, we know that we learn from our peers. You know, sometimes you learn things from your kids and sometimes your kids learn things from you. But all of those things, we really like take that on at our school. Our fourth is that a learning environment is composed of its community members, cultural values and physical surroundings. So what makes seeks what seeks is has to do with where we are, who we are, and who's a part of our school at any given time. And the fifth is that improvement of an organization requires constantly collaborative participation by its community members. And we mean students and parents and teachers and administrators and then the broader community. And all of those folks are constantly working together to make our school better. Students design their own projects. So you hear project-based learning. Ours is student-driven project-based learning. So students are designing their own projects that can be really messy. What's happening here is students, this was our, our essential question was, what is the value of plastic? And these students for their project decided to make drums, musical instruments out of all plastic. So there you have plastic tape, some plastic buckets. Then they present to a public audience. This is at our public presentations of learning we'd held at KCC in December. We had about 300 people come and see these students' projects. And the students are the experts. And it means so much when you're 11 and you know more than anyone else in the room about the thing you did. It is so empowering for them and they get such ownership of their learning by this public presentation. As is customary at the Harvard Club, Buffy's talk was followed by Q&A with attendees at the meeting. Charter schools provide an opportunity for innovation in the public school system. So in the DOE, there's typically decisions are made at the higher level and then trickle down through the system. And in charter schools, innovation can happen right there with the students, teachers and the administrators because it's just a smaller system. So change can happen at a lot quicker of a pace and you can pilot new ideas. And so you can sort of think of charters as an opportunity for research and development arm for public schools. I'm an advocate of public schools in general and I'm an advocate of school choice. And I think that charter schools provide an opportunity for parents to have choice, schools of choice that are public, tuition free is really the primary thing for that. I think parents should examine their local public schools and consider geographic exemptions to non-local public schools and consider charter schools. And then there's also independent schools as well. But I think charter schools add a real element of choice for mission-based schools. My school is CEICS, which is the School for Examining Essential Questions of Sustainability. And we're middle school right now and we're an interdisciplinary project-based school that's built around essential questions through the lens of sustainability. Our students do project-based work in the afternoon. But in the mornings, they have more of the traditional subjects, English, science, math, history and arts. And then I get to apply the concepts that they learn in those morning blocks in the afternoon project-based work and really then do things more than just learning stuff. Well, the future I hope for CEICS is that we'll be a six through 12th grade school once we find an adequate facility that can serve all of our students in Honolulu. And the future is that we are working in the community and that our students are serving the Hawaii-based community while they're in middle and high school and then they can come right after high school and start really making change at the meta level here in Hawaii. Want to know more about Buffy Cushman Patz and her work at CEICS? Check out seqs.org. If you want to know more about the Harvard Club, check out hchawaii.clubs.harvard.edu. Thanks to Buffy Cushman Patz for presenting this talk and for allowing us to attend. We appreciate the opportunity to participate and to share in the monthly discussions organized by the club. And now, let's take a look at our Think Tech calendar events going forward. Think Tech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekday afternoons. And then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long. And some people listen to them all night long. 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