Good morning, CharterFolk.
This week we are excited to recognize Michael Chalupa, Executive Director of City Neighbors Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland, as CharterFolk Extraordinaire.
City Neighbors is the story of a group of people who have been driven by a belief that public schools carefully created by intentional designs and supported by entire communities have the potential to change public education at profound levels.
The school’s origins grew out of a circumstance where the local public school system was struggling to perform even base functions acceptably well. In 2005, Baltimore Public Schools were experiencing a $52M operating shortfall …
… and were exhibiting other brokenness so severe that one of HBO’s most hallowed series based a whole season around the system’s struggles.
Against this backdrop of setback and dysfunction a group of parents from 17 families …
… began coming together to talk about the possibility of creating a completely new kind of public school, one that would not only break free from the constraints that held back so many other Baltimore schools but would keep front and center an overarching question that has framed the organization’s efforts to this very day.
As the community became more tight knit, they drew to their ranks, Mike Chalupa and school founder Bobbi Macdonald …
… two extraordinary educators who foresaw that a continued focus on imagining the best school possible had the potential to allow a completely new kind of public education to emerge …
… by design.
A school that, by design …
… would feature project-based learning.
A school that, by design …
would integrate the arts.
A school that, by design …
… would serve a diverse group of students.
To name but a few characteristics that City Neighbors would become renowned for as it opened as a K-5 school serving 120 students and grew to become a three-school organization serving 800 students through 12th grade.
Through the organization’s evolution, Mike has come to be recognized as the key steward of the City Neighbors’ design principles. As Peter French, a founding teacher of City Neighbors wrote in this op-ed:
Then I met Mike Chalupa, who changed everything for me.
Mike changed everything by making sure that the organization lived out what it had chosen to do by design, including … …
… understanding teachers to be the very heart of the school.
Further imagining the best school possible over its nearly two decades of operation, City Neighbors has gone on to host summits and workshops that draw hundreds of educators from across the country, including their 10th summit …
… which concluded just last week, with Mike co-hosting along with other City Neighbors staff.
Over Mike’s 16 years at City Neighbors, he has grown into a forceful presence for advocacy, helping the school prevail on many policy challenges …
… including overcoming Baltimore Public Schools’ attempt to withhold funding from charter schools in 2015 …
… by bringing in the voice of City Neighbors parents.
Advocacy is yet another aspect of operating a charter school that City Neighbors has excelled at going all the way back to the very beginning, overcoming Baltimore Public Schools’ decision to impose an arbitrary cap on the number of charter schools in the city …
… appealing to the State Board of Education in order to “get on the map” as an operating school …
… only to find itself immediately needing to turn around and sue Baltimore Public Schools in order to receive the full funding that City Neighbors’s students were entitled to.
Taken together, the range of advocacy matters that City Neighbors has prevailed upon over the years begs a rather straightforward question:
How did such a little startup charter school organization in the middle of an enormous public school system turn out to be such an advocacy powerhouse?
Well, how else would City Neighbors have done it, but ….
… by design …
… having written into the organization’s governance model from its very origins that it would have an “Advocacy Committee” …
… charged with ensuring that the school would overcome the policy challenges it was certain to encounter in the years ahead.
It’s a responsibility that Mike and the City Neighbors community take on to this very day, not only advocating for the continued success of City Neighbors, but indeed for all charter schools in Baltimore.
Is there any wonder that an organization set up to support hundreds of charter schools across the country becoming diverse by design …
… would look to have its board chair become Mike Chalupa …
… a leader who has helped so many breakthroughs in public education happen … by design?
In an era when so much of public education seems simply unable to muster the intentionality needed to create the excellent options that are required during incredibly challenging times, some charter school leaders do an an extraordinary job of reminding us that the best schools we can imagine are actually within our grasp if have the courage and commitment to create public schools by design. Mike Chalupa is one such leader.
It is why we could not be more honored today than to recognize Mike Chalupa as CharterFolk Extraordinaire.