New York City Charter School Center

for the past 18 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 educationreform, in general: we educate and engage communities and influencers on thevalue of Charter schools, proactively framing the public discussion with research anddata as well as pushing back opponents and guiding and coordinating the sector.2. Empower Charter schools to serve all students: through the collaborative forinclusive education, we support nyc Charter schools as they seek to equitably recruit,educate and retain all students, including students with disabilities and multilinguallearners.3. Ensure operational Excellence and sustainability: we help by providing resources,trainings and guidance Charter schools not only comply with all state and local lawsand policies, but also implement best practices in nonprofit operations.4. Support New School development: we build the capacity of planning and start upteams 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 seekout opportunities to partner with the nyc doe and district schools to transfer learnings and innovations to improve public education for all students.highlights of the Charter Center's 2021-22 work include:- researching and developing numerous fact sheets, reports/white papers, op-edsdesigned to myth bust and educate the public and policymakers, alike, about thecharter 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'scharter cap.- held nyc department of education accountable for delivering the supports andservices that Charter schools are entitled to as part of nyc's public education system.collaborated with administration & nyc doe to secure New opportunities, protectautonomy and encourage collaboration.- monitoring ny's three authorizers to ensure their standards for opening and closingcharter schools remain consistent and high.- conducting several citywide, multilingual media campaigns to inform families aboutthe Charter School option. The campaigns, which include Charter School open housemonth, a Charter School fair and how to apply, support Charter School recruitmentefforts.- offering nearly 200 remote, hybrid and in-person trainingsworkshopsprofessionaldev... opportunities, exposing charters to best practices in the fields of inclusiveeducation programming and supports as well as human resources, finances andoperations.- supporting potential and start-up Charter leaders, via New School developmentprogramming, to develop thoughtful School designs and strong operational practices.- facilitating an easy-to-use common online Charter School application that enablesparents to apply to multiple Charter schools at once; more than 80,000 applicationscame through the common app, which is offered in 10 languages.