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CHARTER SCHOOLS TODAY

Winter 2008

www.charterschoolstoday.com

LAFAYETTE ACADEMY THE ALEXANDER CHARTER COMPANY, INC Rebuilding After Disaster Reusing and Revitilizing

THE MAG A ZINE FOR CH ARTER SCHOOL EX ECU TIVES

Lafayette Academy Charter

Rebuilding After Disaster Produced by Eric Gunn & Written by Jim Barlow Head of school Mickey Landry took over New Orleans’ Lafayette Academy in July 2007 just after the failing school had reopened as a charter school in 20062007. “It was terrible,” he says. “They had very low teacher morale. In the year before my arrival the school had lost 20 out of 50 teachers before Christmas.

The tiles on the floor were gone. The place was filthy - you could smell the human waste on the floors of the hallways. The toilets hadn’t been flushed much less cleaned. There were 324 window missing window panes. It was a wreck but I knew they had a core group of great people at the school and that we could build the school around them.”

Since taking over from a for-profit company in 2007, Landry and his 92 staff have used their $9 million budget to significantly improve conditions for the 750 students in pre-K to seventh grade. “We’ve come along way. The building looks magnificent. Everyone who comes in it thinks it’s just the brightest cheeriest place. But we have a long way to go - our kids can do a lot more and we want to get there as quickly as we can.”

Landry returned to New Orleans, where he grew up, after several years heading independent schools in New Hampshire and Colorado. “I saw post-Katrina New Orleans and wanted to do something for it,” he says of his return. And he has implemented a unique approach to teaching.

“From my own experience of running schools that were failing and had to be turned around, the key element is getting all of the adults pulling in the same direction. It either happens or it doesn’t happen with individual teachers. My experience is that a school is going nowhere unless all the adults are on the same

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US Executive Journal Summer Edition 2008 Charter Schools Today Winter Edition 2008

page.” They have an extensive professional development program, with weekly meetings and consultants to work with teachers Lafayette also has a wide-ranging teaching technique: “We’re using what we call a total instructional alignment approach by which our teachers focus very carefully on state standards; we assess frequently, and use that data to re-teach standards that were not learned well or to plan for the next standards that our kids need to know. We use a lot of

guided practice with immediate coaching feedback - that’s very important.”

Standardized tests for students don’t have a big impact on the curriculum. But No Child Left Behind’s highly qualified teacher’s stipulations and AYP measure are stifling. ‘I think a lot of teachers find it very confining and very humiliating that their profession has been reduced to a test score and that’s got to change,” says Landry. “The 22 years prior to my returning to NO I ran independent schools

COMPANY AT A GLANCE Established : 2006 Staff : 92 Students: 750 Head of School : Mickey Landry www.lafayetteacademyno.org

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Charter Schools Today

Winter Edition 2008

In September 2005 EPS joined School Specialty Inc., an education company devoted to providing a broad range of innovative programs and services to help educators engage, instruct, and inspire students of all abilities.

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around the country,” he explains. “There are no restrictions there, and we were able to get the best teachers we could find, no matter what--people who had a depth of knowledge of the subject matter and who we could train to teach the way we want to teach. Those are the types of schools that are leading the United States in terms of test scores and almost everything else. That’s the model I’m used to and that’s what I would prefer because we just found better teachers that way.”

The school sticks to an intensive counseling program for misconduct, with social workers on campus. They also support parents and families if needed and have a special positive behavior reward scheme. “The one the kids would tell you about first is something called Superstore. Kids can earn super tickets to spend in the super store once a week and buy things that are donated to us - everything from trinkets

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To learn more about School Specialty, please visit www.schoolspecialty.com.

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Winter Edition 2008

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to iPods. They can earn those with good behavior and good academic work.”

If suspensions are required, they’re in school and have a counseling element.

Expulsions come after a hearing and with help for families - just one of the outreach projects the school runs. “Our social workers and administrators will visit homes. We have a lot of meetings and open houses, literacy nights and math nights, things like that. One of the most powerful things we do is a health fair for the community by which lots of the social work and mental health agencies came on

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Charter Schools Today

Winter Edition 2008

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Winter Edition 2008

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Charter Schools Today

Winter Edition 2008

campus and the whole community comes.”

“Mostly,” adds Landry, “we’ve just been hunkering down and trying to get the fundamentals of a well functioning school together. But they have found time to get a pen-pal program for 5th graders going with a school in California. Students from that school came to visit this year, and they hope to raise the money to send Lafayette kids to the west coast next year.

For the moment, around $500,000 has been spent on renovations. They’re consulting with architects and contractors and hope to take plans, including a new gymnasium, to the state for private public partnership funding. “In five years’ time we’ll be pretty close to a 90, 90, 90 school and still a happy productive welcoming place for students and the community,” says Landry. “I think our community relations program will be developed better by then - there’ll be a kind of blurring of the lines between the community and the school.

What keeps him awake at night at the moment though, is a post-Hurricane New Orleans. “I see the pain that my children are going through.” he says. “The level of transience they experience because they have to move a lot, the lack of resources they have in the city right now. We just try to help any way we can.”

Having serviced many of the schools and universities for over 15 years, we have seen the importance of positive perception. The perception that children, parents, faculty, staff and regulatory agencies have of a facility is crucial to their confidence in the professionalism of the institution. When positive perception is adopted by a facility, it creates a cultural shift within that facility which begins with a clean environment. It was with this shared vision that the partnership between Mickey Landry, Lafayette Academy of New Orleans and Hithe Enterprises DBA Jani-King was forged.

Our relationship did not happen overnight. Communication built over weeks of site visits and interviews with staff and board members helped develop site specific cleaning methods. This collective approach to “do the right thing for the right reasons” was very refreshing and reinforced our commitment to the project. Change the environment, change the perception, change the culture in an educational facility and you will cultivate growth from the children within it. Our goal was one that would produce a clean environment that would reduce illness and boost productivity from the children to the faculty and staff resulting in an increase in enrollment, attendance and a positive educational environment.

We would like to thank Mr. Landry and Choice Foundation DBA Lafayette Academy for allowing us to be apart of the evolution of Lafayette Academy. We have traveled a long way and still have further to go but know we look forward to getting there with you.

Hithe Enterprises

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CHARTER SCHOOLS TODAY

Winter 2008

www.charterschoolstoday.com

Lafayette Academy Charter 2727 South Carrollton Avenue New Orleans, LA 70118 United States