Academia Antonia Alonso, a dual-language charter school that has hopscotched across New Castle County since its opening in 2014, put its future on the line this spring – and survived.
Academia and the Wilmington-based Eastside Charter both had charter major modification requests approved this week from Secretary of Education Mark Holodick, with affirmation from the State Board of Education. Had Academia’s bid been turned down, the school would have been homeless. Also approved was a minor modification for Odyssey Charter School, which did not require assent from the state board.
Academia, which currently enrolls about 600 children in kindergarten through fifth grade, sought state approval for two major changes to its charter: permission to expand by adding sixth through eighth grades over the next three years and to move from suburban Wilmington into a vacant office building at 300 N. Wakefield Drive near Newark.
The reason for the expansion was twofold, school officials explained in their modification request and in meetings of the Department of Education’s Charter School Accountability Committee (CSAC): parents wanted their children to continue their Spanish-English learning at the middle school level and the school needs to increase enrollment to generate the revenue needed to help pay the rent at their new location. The new site was needed because Academia was unable to negotiate a renewal of its lease in a building owned by Odyssey Charter School at the former Barley Mill Plaza west of Wilmington. That lease expires in June.
Odyssey’s board chose not to renew Academia’s lease because it plans to increase its own enrollments by using some of the classroom space now rented to Academia.
“We were between a rock and a hard place. While there was adequate space at Barley Mill for Academia to continue to grow, the landlord did not offer the space. Our choices were to take a chance with Wakefield or to close."Maria Alonso, president of the Academia Antonia Alonsa board of directors
Odyssey’s expansion forced Academia’s hand, said Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network and a non-voting member of CSAC. Not only did it need to find a new building, but it also had to convince the Department of Education that it had a viable plan to move and to add middle school grades.
“We were between a rock and a hard place. While there was adequate space at Barley Mill for Academia to continue to grow, the landlord did not offer the space. Our choices were to take a chance with Wakefield or to close,” said Maria Alonso, president of the school’s board of directors. “We were clearly in a less than ideal situation than hoped for and Wakefield was the only option left on the table after an arduous and aggressive search throughout the pandemic…. Plan B was closure.”
As a result of this week’s decision, Academia, which spent a year in the Community Education Building in downtown Wilmington before renting a building on Odyssey’s campus, will relocate to a former Delmarva Power office building on Wakefield Drive.
Academia, which now serves kindergarten through fifth grade, will add sixth grade classes in the fall, seventh grade next year and eighth grade in the fall of 2024. With the added grades, enrollment would increase by about 50 percent to 915 in the 2024-25 school year.
The school’s K-5 curriculum uses a two-way immersion model, with instruction split evenly between Spanish and English each day. Students learn their core subjects – language arts, math, science and social studies – in both languages. School leaders say this approach enables students, whether their first language is English or Spanish, acquire both languages as well as higher-level thinking skills.
Enrollment statistics provided with Academia’s modification request show that half of its students are classified as English learners and from low-income families and about three-quarters of them have Hispanic backgrounds.
Parents seek continuity
In its request, Academia’s leaders said that school parents asked for a middle school to provide continuity for their children. They also contended that low-income families that are not English-speaking face challenges in navigating the state’s school choice system – an issue for anyone leaving an elementary school to enter a middle school program. The choice process, the application stated, “can be cumbersome, confusing, and scary to families who come from countries where such a process does not exist…. It has proven to be distressing for many of our families who do not speak English and are unfamiliar with the School Choice process as well as unfamiliar with middle schools in the state of Delaware as a whole.”
Factoring into the continuity issue was another pattern Academia’s leaders recognized among their students: when they finished fifth grade and moved on to middle school, their younger siblings often left as well, since parents tried to keep their children if not in the same school at least in the same district.
For grades 6-8, the curriculum will shift from dual-language immersion to one which will offer instruction in English for all academic subjects, with Spanish being taught to all students as a world language offering.
When Academia started in 2014 in Wilmington, it anticipated that the city’s Spanish-speaking population would provide most of its enrollment. With the move to the suburbs came a vision of a global educational community, with Academia sharing a large campus with the Greek-themed Odyssey. Due to changes in Odyssey’s leadership, that scenario never unfolded. Meanwhile, Academia’s enrollment patterns have changed, and so have the demographics of New Castle County. According to the school’s modification proposal, more than half of its students now live in the Christina School District, where the school’s new building is located, and the Latino population in the greater Newark area is experiencing significant growth.
More growth for Odyssey
Odyssey would use some of the classroom space reclaimed through Academia’s departure to continue to enlarge its K-12 program, boosting its enrollment from nearly 2,000 students to about 2,380 over three years, starting this fall.
Odyssey has a waiting list, so the school should have no trouble filling additional seats, according to Elias Pappas, the head of school. He has said that the new enrollments would be concentrated at the typical entry points for each academic level: kindergarten for elementary and sixth and ninth grades for middle and high school.
Eastside’s new building
The other modification approved this week, for Eastside Charter School in Wilmington, will permit construction of a new science and technology building and to temporarily relocate its middle school students during the construction period.
The construction project was announced in November, when Chemours awarded a $4 million grant to kick start the $13 million Chemours Eastside STEM Discovery Hub. The STEM center, to be built on what is now a parking lot at the school, should be ready for use by the fall of 2023, according to Aaron Bass, Eastside’s CEO. The building will include science classrooms and labs, a maker space, demonstration spaces and meeting rooms that will be available for community activities.
Bass envisions the hub as an educational and community center that will have a significant impact on the northeast Wilmington neighborhood where the school is located. The Wilmington Institute Library will offer programming there, Chemours will use the hub for job training and recruitment during after-school hours, and other community services, like mental health and wellness organizations, might use space at the site, he says.
When the Discovery Hub is completed, Eastside will be able to increase its enrollment by up to 120 students, Bass says. The school currently serves about 460 students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
During the construction period, students in grades 5-8 will attend classes in the Teen Warehouse, a spacious youth resource center about a mile away that opened last year. (In a previous incarnation, the Warehouse was home to Prestige Academy, a defunct charter school.)
The approval of Eastside’s charter modification did come with some strings attached. The school will have to document its plans to ensure that sufficient percentages of its student body participate in the state’s annual education assessments. It will also have to detail how the nurse’s office will function at the Teen Warehouse and, by next summer, provide a transportation plan to accommodate the anticipated increase in enrollments as well as an explanation of how it will handle the increased enrollments if construction of the STEM Hub takes longer than anticipated.
Legislation still pending
This week’s approvals of the charter modifications render moot a proposed moratorium on charter school growth in New Castle County that was included in H.B. 353, sponsored by Rep. Madinah Wilson-Anton, a Bear Democrat. As of this week, the House had not voted on the legislation, and Wilson-Anton had added an amendment that would have exempted the pending modifications from the moratorium. Her bill remains alive, however, as its primary purpose is to create a 14-member advisory group to study current procedures for charter school approvals and modifications and make recommendations for change.
Charter school leaders oppose the legislation. Supporters of traditional public schools say the study is needed because they believe the growth of charters has weakened traditional schools and that leaders of traditional and charter schools do not collaborate with each other with any frequency.
