Charters aimed at minorities

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, Aug. 7, 2006 | 6:58 a.m.

The mood in the North Las Vegas office of Imagine Schools was one of expectation.

A UPS employee had arrived bearing boxes of fourth grade history textbooks. After finding space on top of a filing cabinet, Vickie Frazier-Williams, company vice president, noted to no one in particular that more room would have to be found for textbooks yet to come - somewhere.

Imagine Schools, which runs 70 charter schools across the nation, has teamed up with 100 Black Men of Las Vegas, a nonprofit organization, to open a charter school called the 100 Academy of Excellence.

The academy is one of two local charter schools in the pipeline aimed at minority students. The second, Rainbow Dreams Academy, is slated to open in 2007. Yet a third such school is seeking approval from the state after being rejected by the Clark County School District, which with 300,000-plus students is the nation's fifth largest.

Sonya Horsford, consultant to the Rainbow Dreams Academy, says the Clark County School District's dizzying growth has left behind what she calls underserved students. Horsford says that when she attended a state-run meeting about how to set up a charter school, there were a lot of fellow minorities in attendance.

Frazier-Williams is a little more blunt: "There is a general feeling (in the community) that children of color aren't getting the best education they could."

The academy is scheduled to open Sept. 5 - with any luck at a North Las Vegas building under construction on Comstock Drive near Carey Avenue.

Shaundell Newsome, vice president of development for 100 Black Men, says that his group was inspired to get involved in a charter school because of problems they see in the community.

"There are more young black men going to prison than going to college," he says.

The Las Vegas chapter's members volunteer in public schools to help young people with such things as peer pressure and problems at home.

After three years of working with students in West and North Las Vegas, Newsome says, he had seen "a lot of kids (who) come from broken homes, single parent homes (and) some are being raised by grandparents, or are not being raised at all."

Students from these households don't have a PTA mom or dad backing them up, he says. Not only that, "they have to go to school walking past crack addicts, prostitutes, homeless people and then they have to try to focus on learning."

Newsome's group will help counsel academy students with behavior problems linked to their homes or neighborhoods. Its role, he says, will be to deal with what he calls the social aspect of the students' education - teaching them to respect authority and "how to behave on the street."

Frazier-Williams' company brings the educational part to the mix, emphasizing smaller classes than many public schools and teaching plans tailored to each student's abilities.

More than 460 students from kindergarten through sixth grade had enrolled as of Thursday, most of them from the neighborhood surrounding the school. Fifteen of 19 teachers had been hired.

Eighty percent of the students are black; 10 percent are white. Asian and Hispanic students each make up 5 percent.

Newsome says that he would like the school to help the sort of troubled kids he has been working with for the last three years. He knows, however, that all sorts of families will be interested in a school that is "probably one of the best opportunities for parents who can't afford private school."

Tiffany Alston, a 27-year-old mother of two, has enrolled her daughter, Chardonae, in the school's third grade.

Alston is coordinator of a literacy program funded by the Sunrise Children's Foundation. She says that her daughter wasn't being challenged enough at her former elementary school and she hopes the charter school will have "a better fix on the individual child's success."

Success is important to the school, Frazier-Williams says: "High expectations - that's an issue in minority communities. If there is a belief that certain children in certain communities can learn, then they will learn."