Touting the success of charter schools, Mayor Sheila Dixon announced Sunday that nine of them in Baltimore will together receive $1 million in grant funding for improvements.
Speaking at the Patterson Park Public Charter School, Dixon said charters should get as much money as regular public schools because they do a good job educating kids, and keep communities strong and children safe.
“Our charter schools are public schools,” Dixon said. “It not a matter of them and us or us and them; it?s a matter of all of us together.”
Melanie Hood-Wilson, a board member at the Patterson Park school, which will get part of the grant money, shared the mayor?s sentiments.
“Our students are as public as any of the other children in the centrally operated public school system,” she said. “And now they?ll finally have space that their public school system peers have. This is a huge step in the right direction.”
The funding will pay for already completed renovations of the Patterson Park school?s kitchen and cafeteria, and enable the school to add a gym and give music and Spanish teachers their own classrooms.
Sisters Sydney and Ashley Clarke, among the first students at the charter school when it opened in 2005, participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“It?s going to be bigger, and there will be more room for us,” said Sydney, a sixth-grader.
In the fall, students dined in a temporary outdoor lunchroom because the current cafeteria was too small.
The funding is the first public money in Maryland that has gone toward facility improvements at public charter schools, officials said.
The grant money is part of Dixon?s broad plan for revitalizing city school facilities.
The plan includes initiating feasibility studies for finding alternative funding sources for improving other school facilities and city recreation areas.
The Patterson Park school has 480 students in grades kindergarten through sixth and will soon add seventh and eighth grades.
At a glance
List of charter school grant recipients:
» Baltimore International Academy: $25,000
» City Neighbors Charter School: $170,000
» Coppin Academy High School: $25,000
» The Crossroads School: $170,000
» The Green School: $117,500
» Inner Harbor East Academy for Young Scholars: $100,000
» The Midtown Academy: $160,000
» The Northwood Appold Community Academy: $117,500
» Patterson Park Public Charter School: $100,000
