Arapahoe Charter School - A Community Gem

Arapahoe, a small eastern North Carolina town with a population approximately 450, is located six minutes north of Minnesott Beach and 16 miles from Havelock. Greenville and Raleigh, the state capital, are 60 and 133 miles away, respectively.

The only school in this rural town for kindergarten through eighth grade is Arapahoe Charter School, led by administrative director Tom McCarthy, who doesn't hesitate to say that in five years his school "will be the most successful charter school in the state of North Carolina.

"I really believe we can be," said McCarthy, an alum of nearby Havelock High School. "This is a great school. Coming from traditional public schools, I have found this school to be a diamond in this community with its small size and family atmosphere. It's good for kids."

Arapahoe Charter School operates on a $3.5 million annual budget. Enrollment is 346, and it employs some 60 staff members, including 22 teachers. Many were employees in 1997, when it was founded amid the Pamlico County School District's plans to shut down the town's school, which had existed since the 1860s. Today, it is one of 98 charter schools of a 100-maximum allowed by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) under the state's Charter School Law that was enacted in 1996. The school, among the first 38 to apply for charter status, is guided by a Board of Directors consisting of three staff members, three parents and three community members.

Running a charter school is not without challenges, said McCarthy, who holds a bachelor's degree in social sciences education from Elon College and a master's degree in education administration from East Carolina University. He joined Arapahoe Charter School in August 2008 after working 14 years in the public school system, where he served as a teacher and then an administrator at the junior high level. McCarthy, born in North Carolina to a U.S. Marine father, spent much of his childhood, until eighth-grade, up and down the East Coast until his family returned to Havelock.

The greatest challenges his school faces are meeting standards of both the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 and state-directed assessment tests. The latter, McCarthy said, drives the curriculum and leaves little elbow room for new or experimental courses.

"No Child Left Behind is an admirable act," he said. "I just think there are some holes and gaps that need to be filled in." Among them, he said, are teacher certification standards and progress requirements.

He tells the story of a school music teacher who has performed all over the world and is considered to be an excellent educator of young children. This teacher, however, cannot teach a core curriculum course in music despite having passed the required Praxis Exam for music, because he doesn't hold a four-year degree, a requirement for obtaining a "highly qualified" status by the state's education agency DPI, which administers federal teacher certification.

"If he had a four-year degree in anything -- forestry, for example -- and passed the music Praxis, he would be 'highly qualified' under state rules, ignoring his life experience and the fact that his entire world has been about music," McCarthy said. "Do you see the inconsistencies there?" The teacher's music class is coded as a special topic rather than a core course, allowing him to teach.

The state requires 75 percent of charter school teachers in elementary schools to be certified while 50 percent in middle and high school must be certified. Charter school teachers also must follow NCLB requirements for highly qualified staff.

Meeting some of the other NCLB mandates also cause a great deal of stress for schools and teachers, mainly because of potential federal sanctions for not meeting them, including the requirement "that everybody must meet the standards 100 percent by 2013," McCarthy said.

"I don't know how realistic that is, especially when you look at the student populations that are included: exceptional students and English-as-second-language students," he said. "I think it's very difficult to get 100 percent of anything. How many times has Congress been 100 percent on a vote? How many times do you get 100 percent of people to a goal? With some of the disabilities that some students have, I don't think it is practical.

"If a child is labeled as exceptional, and we know he has a limited IQ or reading at a different grade level, yet we have to assess him at his current grade level. If I know a fifth grader is reading on a third-grade level, why can't I assess him on that third-grade level? You do everything that you can, but there is a reason that that child is disabled. ESL students come in at different times and different levels -- with a language barrier," he said. "Why can't they take the test in Spanish? They might be geniuses."

Spanish-speaking students and parents present a real challenge for educators in this small town founded in 1714. The agriculturally-rich region has long drawn migrant workers. As in many U.S. cities, there are increasing numbers of immigrants that are becoming permanent residents in Pamlico County and finding year-round employment in the fishing and service industries, McCarthy said.

To address the language challenge, Arapahoe Charter School offers evening adult-learning classes for Spanish-speaking families. By day, ESL teachers work with students in regular classes, practicing inclusion, instead of segregating students in separate rooms. The school has also begun experimenting with audio files, recorded in general Mexican-dialect Spanish, for parents to download to learn about what is going on in their children's classes or about school programs. For families without Web access, MP3 players are provided so that children can carry them to and from home to keep open lines of communication between the school and the parents.

The school taps successful approaches by teachers, holding "sharing sessions" in which teachers of each grade discuss what's working for them. Teachers also meet for "vertical exchanges," McCarthy said, that allow second-grade teachers to give progress reports to their students' first-grade teachers and to ensure that they are on target for their third-grade teachers' expectations. Teachers also are encouraged to be innovative in their presentation of mandated materials that will be covered on the state's assessment tests.

"I think teachers need to make sure that they are presenting lessons in a variety of modalities," McCarthy said. "One of the things I'm a firm believer in is learning styles. You have visual learners, auditory learners and kinesthetic learners. I think it is important to present information to students in a variety of ways, so that you appeal to all students."

For more information, visit the Arapahoe Charter School's Web site: (http://arapahoecharter.wordpress.com/).
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