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CHARTER SCHOOLS TODAY www.charterschoolstoday.com

GATEWAY ACADEMY ALEXANDER KUATHE OCHARTER KA LA PUBLIC Partnerships with SCHOOL Parents COMPANY, INC and the CHARTER Community Reusing andWith Revitilizing Education Aloha

THE MAG A ZINE FOR CH ARTER SCHOOL EX ECU TIVES

Gateway Charter Academy Partnerships with Parents and the Community Produced by Eric Gunn & Written by Jim Barlow

Less than a decade ago, Robbie L. Moore, superintendent of Gateway Charter Academy in Dallas, Texas, wanted to walk away from education and pursue another field. However, his life took another turn and this May he will watch a handful of students walk for graduation at the charter school he founded in 2000 and opened a year later.

elementary students still attend classes in the church building, while the middle and high-school grades are in rented facilities not far away. A new $10 million middle/high school with 46,000 square-feet of learning spaces, including science and computer labs, a band room, and an area for performing arts, is scheduled to open in the fall. The school employs 45 teachers among its 95 member staff.

Five of the eight candidates for graduation enrolled in the school when it opened in 2001 with 90 students in K-6th grade classes in the south Dallas church, where Moore had attended a youngster. At least two of the five students are headed off to college in the fall. Next year, 60 students will be eligible to graduate.

Moore admits that he is proud of what the school has accomplished in its eight years and about his decision to stay in education. “I never wanted to be a teacher. I never wanted to be a principal,” he said. “I never wanted to be an administrator. I was called into the ministry at 18 years of age.”

Gateway Charter today is a twocampus complex with about 700 students and a $7 million annual budget overseen by a five-member board of trustees. Kindergarten and

To that end, he earned degrees from Dallas Baptist University, Dallas Theological Seminary and Trinity University, but the call he answered was from a pastor in Arlington, Texas,

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who asked him to teach third grade at a private school. After a oneyear commitment, he was named principal. Five years later, ready to move on, he was asked by fellow teachers to consider founding a charter school to meet “a huge need” in the Dallas area. “I had to learn what a charter school was,” he recalled.

When the school opened, many in the initial student body, kindergarten through sixth grade, were at-risk students already struggling and under-performing at public schools.

Today, Gateway Charter’s student body is about 95 percent AfricanAmerican, with the remainder being white and Latino. Some 85 percent of the students are from low socioeconomic families and eligible for reduced meals.

The mission of Gateway Charter Academy is to “provide, in partnership with parents and the

community, a multicultural, safe and friendly environment in which children of all ethnic groups are equally respected, educated in basic skills and core content, expected to follow school behavioral guidelines, extended opportunities to express their special talents, and encouraged to maintain and enrich their own unique cultural heritage,” according its Web site.

“We’re about taking students as they are,” Moore said. “We are determined to make each student a productive person not only inside the classroom but as a citizen. Five years after graduation, when we see one of our former students, we want to be proud of that student. We want students to be productive after high school, go to college and do very well in college. That’s our goal -- to prepare our students for college.

We want to get in our students’ minds that they aren’t just here to make good grades; they are here to prepare for college.”

Gateway Charter aligns its curricula with standards set by the Texas Education Agency. The school’s Web site features those standards prominently, including downloadable documents outlining grade-by-grade expectations of the Texas Essentials of Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), which meet assessment requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The school is listed by the TEA as “Acceptable.”

“I think accountability [as measured by TEKS] is necessary, but I think too often that should not be the determining factor on if a school is doing well or not,” Moore said. “I think you should look at how much gain is being done.

Has a school made gains? And how have we done with these struggling students who come in underperforming.

Have students progressed or digressed. I think you need to look at gains over two years. We don’t work miracles.

I don’t know any district that does. We do make gains,

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some faster than others. We are proud of what we are doing. We are taking what is given to us. We’re not making lemonade with that, we’re making a factory.

We work hard day in and day out.”

Gateway’s teachers offer tutoring throughout the day, including evenings, and on Saturdays. Some of the school’s federal funds are used to support efforts to raise performance of struggling students. They also are used for recruiting high qualified teachers, especially in science and math, or to get “good teachers” identified by the school into classes that lead to their certification as highly qualified.

While Gateway uses a variety of teaching methods, the most useful tool has been Plato Learning, a longrunning technology-driven system offering help in intervention and credit recovery. “Plato brings in a visual dimension and gives our teachers options to find new ways to address struggles students are having meeting objectives, especially in math,” Moore said.

Using Plato, teachers can use Web-based programming

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to design individualized assignments or develop whole-class projects. “Plato has been a great plus for us. We use in the summer as well, especially in math. Our students respond better with technology. Plato has helped us in our math, science and reading. It works for us in all grades.”

“It’s the little things that will give us our distinction,” Moore says, and he envisions Gateway being a pilot school for other charter schools in throughout the state.

COMPANY AT A GLANCE Established : 2000 Students : 700 Annual Budget : $7 million Superintendent : Robbie L. Moore

www.gatewaycharter.org

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Gateway Charter Academy 6103 Houston School Road Dallas, TX 75241 United States