“It was an incredibly rapid move, and I don’t know how we would have gotten it done without them. Seriously, we probably wouldn’t have. They were there for us with every aspect of the process.”
A very unique Palm Beach charter school approached CEN for assistance with providing training and support to its governing board. CEN staff helped that board to refine its conflict-of-interest policy and practices and to address parent complaints about some of the school’s practices. At the school’s request, CEN was able to provide an outside perspective to help the school to address the concerns and to improve its understanding of Florida laws, some of which were challenging to navigate. Drawing on experiences with ESE structures across the state, the CEN staff was able to provide assistance that brought crisis-level activities down to a manageable condition.
The school board’s president described that early phase of their work together like this:
“Christy and her team have deep experience with other charter schools and strong experience with serving those with special needs. I’m the board president, and most of the members of our board do not have experience in these areas. Christy and the CEN team do. They helped to write our application and then shepherd it through the approval process. She also had a great handle on regulations. They had been there and done all that stuff before. And that freed us up to focus on the central issues – staffing, leadership, curriculum.”
“Our school consists of about 170 special needs students. There are ways in which that made the process of forming the school and setting up its processes more difficult. Children with autism need dramatically different ratios of teachers and the process of funding was tricky. The type of support the students needed and the resources needed, she understood and knew how to provide us with the help we needed to meet the students’ needs.”
After that initial work in getting the school started, it returned to CEN for assistance with a major relocation. CEN staff worked with school staff and other outside entities, including a construction company and FLDOE, to manage this transition, looking at the staffing plan, the instructional model, and issues of ESE compliance and planning. Throughout this relationship, CEN has aimed to support the founder’s vision of an ABA-based charter school serving those with autism.
As the school’s principal described it, “It was an incredibly rapid move, and I don’t know how we would have gotten it done without them. Seriously, we probably wouldn’t have. They were there for us with every aspect of the process – contractor bids, construction, zoning, furnishing the school, setting up utilities, inspections, and suggesting things we might otherwise have overlooked (including mold inspection and remediation). They also provided a great deal of expertise around campus safety and security. We have now been in the building for two years, and we flourished in the new facility, which gave us the ability to serve more students. They helped us with curriculum, trainings, culture, team building. There was nothing that we came up with that they had not seen and dealt with before.”
“We got help in the areas we had planned to work with them,” said the board president, “and they also ended up helping us in areas we hadn’t anticipated. She helped us with meetings with parents and that made for a very smooth process. Parents felt listened to and heard, and it made for a better product all the way around. It also reduced friction. When parents don’t feel heard, conflicts can arise. Christy and her team made sure the parents felt heard.”
“Christy is very open and we really have a very collegial relationship. The problems we encounter are often quite specialized and there are limited resources available for a school like ours. An outsider to the school, like Christy, who is very knowledgeable, is absolutely invaluable. She brings a fresh perspective and resources that we otherwise wouldn’t have had available to us. She connected us with experts we really benefited from.”
CEN has enjoyed a multi-year collaboration with this school, listening closely to the school’s needs, serving as a key resource for school staff in major transitions, and bringing additional outside resources to bear on issues that yielded significant improvements for the school.
