New York City Charter School Center

for the past 19 years, the New York City Charter School Center, the country's first citywide Charter support strategy , has served as a one-stop-shop for ensuring the growth and vitality of nyc's Charter sector. Our integrated approach to building a favorable policy environment, solving industry-wide challenges, ensuring quality, growing the movement and providing key supports and services has "cleared the brush," so that Charter schools can focus on their core work of educating children. Our work is guided by five strategic priorities:1. Create a favorable public policy environment for Charter schools and education reform, in general: we educate and engage communities and influencers on the value of Charter schools, proactively framing the public discussion with research and data as well as pushing back opponents and guiding and coordinating the sector.2. Empower Charter schools to serve all students: through the collaborative for inclusive education, we support nyc Charter schools as they seek to equitably recruit, educate and retain all students, including students with disabilities and multilingual learners.3. Ensure operational Excellence and sustainability: we help by providing resources, trainings and guidance to ensure Charter schools not only comply with all state and local laws and policies, but also implement best practices in nonprofit operations.4. Support New School development: we build the capacity of planning and start up teams as well as schools growing grades so as to increase their chances for success.5. Transfer Charter School successes back into nyc's public School system: we seek out opportunities to partner with the nyc doe and district schools to transfer learnings and innovations to improve public education for all students.our work during the 2022-23 School year included:- researching and developing numerous fact sheets, reports/white papers, op-eds designed to myth bust and educate the public and policymakers, alike, about the Charter School model.- ensuring no legislation passed that negatively changes New York's Charter schoolsact or harms/hampers Charter operations or the model itself. Maintaining the urgency,via press conferences, rallies, media opportunities, around the need for a lift in nyc's Charter cap.- holding nyc department of education accountable for delivering the supports and services that Charter schools are entitled to as part of nyc's public education system. Collaborated with administration & nyc doe to secure New opportunities, protect autonomy and encourage collaboration.- monitoring ny's three authorizers to ensure their standards for opening and closing Charter schools remain consistent and high.- conducting several citywide, multilingual media campaigns to inform families about the Charter School option. The campaigns, which include Charter School open house month, a Charter School fair and how to apply, support Charter School recruitment efforts.- offering nearly 200 remote, hybrid and in-person trainingsworkshopsprofessionaldev... opportunities, exposing charters to best practices in the fields of inclusive education programming and supports as well as human resources, finances and operations.- supporting potential and start-up Charter leaders, via New School development programming, to develop thoughtful School designs and strong operational practices.- facilitating an easy-to-use common online Charter School application that enables parents to apply to multiple Charter schools at once; more than 80,000 applications came through the common app, which is offered in 10 languages.