Charter School's

Know of any???

Here, we do not have charter schools, but people can lobby the school obards for specialized schools, but as money is tight, they are few and far between.

IMHO, (and I may be totally off base) specialized schools tend to get support from the following “grassroots” groups for
*french immersion (this is canada)(definitely lousy for ld kids)
*traditional schools with uniforms, teacher centred instruction, kids in rows etc (often lousy for ld kids)
*montessori schools
*fine arts schools (can be good for ld kids)

A small group of us has been advocating for a publicly funded LD school, but because we are small and because this is viewed to be “anti-inclusion” the concept is rejected.

But…one urban school district has a number of “mini-schools” (essentially annexes of regular high schools) for ld kids; they are popular and quite successful. One specializes, for example, in gifted-LD kids. Alas, an article in the paper today called such “min-schools” elitist and taking resources from the regular classes.

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HiVictoria!
We may have chatted on the GT Special site?(or another?) I took your advice regarding the second son and he has had ot tutoring for a year and will be going to a small ld school that uses multi-sensory techniques.

To answer your question, the Vancouver School Board has a number of “mini-schools” the two that i am interested in are at Prince of Wales Secondary , special programs for Gifted-LD (the GOLD program) and for emotionally fragile gifted kids. In this era of cutbacks, even these highly successful programs are being called “elitist” by some!

I was in the States when my daughter was in high school. Our school district was a famed disaster area, with several schools on the list for state takeover because they were doing so badly.
There was one shining light in the whole district, my daughter’s high school. It was trun by a principal who had the weird and radical idea that a high school should be a learning environment. The buiklding had been planned for a maximum of 2500 students; the year she graduated it reached 3400. They had 18 portable or “temporary” classrooms in the back parking lot. These were actually highly desired locations because they had windows — the rest of the school was one of those ghastly 1970’s things that looked like a prison on the hill. And even with the massive overcrowding, lack of sufficient gym and cafeteria, and no windows, there was a waiting list fighting to get in.
About a third of the school population was in a science-tech program that required an exam to get in, but the other two-thirds was supposedly regular high school. But they had five or six bands, five or six choirs, seven second-language programs, and almost every Advanced Placement course in existence, and the best Latin teacher in the country (as I said, the prinicipal was wacky enough to think it should be a place to learn all sorts of things, not just cram one science program). This was the *only* school in the district where the SAT’s were above average. It was also clean and orderly.
So, the district got a new superintendent, who had supposedly turned around a failing school district in New Jersey and who was otherwise politically correct — and what did she do? Well, first she hired four of her friends at a hundred thou a year each without consulting the school board — this in a district where roofs were falling in and kids didn’t have texts and the health board closed cafeterias full of roaches. Then the next hing she did was to remove half the portable classrooms from our high school because “other schools needed them more.” How can *anyone* need classrooms more than a school that is 1000 students over its maximum load?? Then she made it very very clear that this high school had all that fancy equipment and all those books (much less than one per student, still) and that this was “unfair” to all the other schools that didn’t have such luxuries — the fact that 90% of the difference came not from more input, from a decent principal who maintained the building and equipment, rather than letting it go to theft and vandalism, was irrelevant; it was “unfair” that one group of kids had a decent school while everyione else had a lost cause, and she was going to fix that by cutting back on the one decent school.
The good principal took an offer from a special science-tech school in North Carolina that was very happy to lure him away.
The temporary classrooms were removed *two weeks* before classes opened. Now, this is a place with 3400 students and 120 teachers and who knows how much other staff. And kids taking multiple AP{ classes and music and several foreign languages. Arranging that schedule was a matter of several *months* every spring. Trying to deal with 10% of your school being lifted in a midnight flit overnight was of course chaos. Not to mention a new principal.
What used to be a prize-winning high school and a source of pride and an amazing educational opportunity for a huge number of ordinary kids is now descending into the crime and vandalism and the cycle of failure that the rest of the area is in. But it’s “fair” — everybody gets an equally rotten education.