This fall, all schools are struggling to devise ways to safely educate students in the midst of the pandemic. The charter schools whose facilities LISC has helped fund and guide are no different. Yvonne Nolan, who directs LISC’s charter schools financing work, checks in with some of our partner schools, who are taking cues from their communities to forge a new kind of education, and points out the ways CDFIs can help with this difficult process.
Back-to-school season is normally an exciting time for students, filled with supply shopping, new routines and the anticipatory joy of making friends and learning skills. Not so in 2020. For many students, caregivers, teachers, and schools, the uncertainty of returning to school in the midst of both a global pandemic and social unrest as a response to police brutality and systemic racism has made the process stressful and confusing. All have had to confront the adequacy of their school infrastructure for pandemic-era learning (think ventilation and classroom size), as well as the depth and appropriateness of school curricula and culture for Black and Brown students.
LISC Charter School Financing provides the financing and technical assistance charter schools need to complete their facility projects. The schools with whom we work, like many across the country that educate primarily Black and Brown students, play a wide range of roles. They serve as community hubs, connectors to key services for families like food, and providers of critical wraparound services. Wraparound services are designed to provide holistic support and address a student’s academic, social, or behavioral needs. The pandemic added yet another role to this list: helping to stop the spread of COVID-19 by instituting health and safety protocols necessary for their students and staff. While there is no “right answer” for managing this unprecedented back-to-school season, we have been inspired by our partner schools’ innovative approaches to the daunting obstacles they each face.
To Reopen or Not to Re-Open, or Something In Between
All schools have had to weigh the decision of whether to open in-person, virtually, or via a hybrid of both. They are balancing their mandate to educate students while also implementing social distancing and mask-wearing requirements. They must also provide PPE for staff and students, with no extra funding to do so. Moreover, some states have instituted data-driven guidelines for school re-opening (and closing) that rely on regional infection rates, over which schools have no control.
For schools planning to reopen in person, there are still more hard choices. Which parts of their curriculum will be delivered live and which will be recorded? How can they operationalize health and safety guidelines? Equity by Design, an initiative by The Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School, has assembled a toolkit that helps schools think through these operational decisions, and includes a scheduling map and guidebook to assist in creating these unprecedented in-person learning environments.
The schools LISC supports have tackled these decisions in a number of ways. Some spent the summer piloting new approaches. El Sol Science & Arts Academy (“El Sol”) in California, for example, with nearly 1,000 students in Pre-K through eighth grade, developed a summer program to test out social distancing, target new best practices, and assess the educational needs of students. El Sol continued meal service throughout the summer via a drive-up distribution system for breakfast and lunch. Their school-based food pantry, Mercado El Sol, remained open, as did their Federally Qualified Health Center, the SOS/El Sol Wellness Center.
Most of the schools LISC works with have chosen to open virtually or via a hybrid model. KIPP New Jersey, a charter network of schools in Newark and Camden, NJ, is offering remote learning until October. “While in-person instruction is preferred, we are committed to starting the school year with a plan that prioritizes the safety of our students and staff,” said Gabriella DiFilippo, Chief Operating Officer of KIPP NJ. “At this time we’re providing high quality instruction online while preparing our buildings and updating protocols for reopening when it’s safe to do so.”
Bridging the Digital Divide
Along with the decision to open remotely, schools also need to ensure that their students have the resources, hardware, and internet access they need to be successful. It is no easy task, demonstrated by the fact that the dominant virtual learning platform, Zoom, crashed on the first day of school.
In communities with spotty and inequitable internet access, teachers have gone above and beyond. El Sol has distributed more than 500 devices and funded the installation of 100 hotspots for families, and has made instructional materials available in both print and electronic forms. KIPP Newark Collegiate Academy, a high school in Newark, distributed books, school supplies and more than 4,000 Chromebooks to students to equip them for remote learning.
Supporting Emergency Responders and Essential Workers
Remote opening also means finding ways to support the children of emergency responders and essential workers who are mandated to report to their jobs, while their children attend school at home. Marion P. Thomas Charter School in Newark, part of the Brick Learning Network, is supporting these families by establishing distance “learning centers.” The network will create 15 separate pods of 12 children who will receive in-person instructional support free of charge. In addition to adult supervision, kids will receive internet service and meal.
How CDFIs Can Help
In these challenging times, it is critical for CDFIs to be flexible with the schools they support. We can help schools budget in anticipation of projected cuts and, going forward, assist schools in demonstrating academic achievement and growth despite not having standardized tests scores from last spring. CDFIs can provide flexible financing structures that help to keep necessary money with the school. LISC has worked hard to be flexible and responsive to the needs of our borrowers. We have waived late loan payment fees, for example, and extended loan origination periods for delayed construction projects. We have also returned good faith deposits if a borrower decided not to move forward with their facility project because of the pandemic.
CDFIs need to recognize that their school partners are the experts on what their students and communities need. One thing is certain: no matter how unstable the current moment may be, teachers and school staff are attempting to create joy every day, to provide the best learning environment for students to succeed. Schools are committed to continuous growth and improvement, flexibility, and adaptation – just see all the examples above. Our public schools have always been institutions that connect new friends, spark joy in learning, and remain great places for students to grow and prosper.
Yvonne Nolan, Vice President
Yvonne manages LISC’s charter school portfolio, and CSF’s strategic partnerships and initiatives. Yvonne also leads LISC’s research and policy contributions to the charter sector, including LISC’s online platform, SchoolBuild: From Idea to Construction, and serves on the Charter School Lenders Coalition and other industry fora. Yvonne has more than ten years of finance and operational experience. Yvonne previously worked as Director of Operations at Achievement First Public Charter Schools in Brooklyn, NY, and as an Associate in Market Risk Management and Analysis at Goldman Sachs. Yvonne holds a BA in Economics from Syracuse University