Charter school co-location is coming to Miami-Dade County Public Schools – NBC 6 South Florida

Next year at this time, elementary school kids will be in classrooms at five high schools in Miami-Dade County. 

It’s the result of a controversial state policy referred to as co-location, which allows charter schools to use space at underenrolled public schools. 

New York charter school operator Success Academy, a non-profit organization, is in the process of transforming a wing at Westland Hialeah Senior High, adding bright colors and the tiny desks and chairs suitable for the youngest students. 

“There is no parent who doesn’t want their kids to learn how to read, fall in love with reading and learning as young as 4, 5, 6 years old, and that’s exactly what we offer here at Success,” said Maleena Guandique, the current principal at one of the Success Academy schools in New York, who will be the senior leader at Success Academy Westland Hialeah. 

Starting next school year, kindergarteners and first-graders will be there, sharing a campus with high school kids. 

“I want parents to know that their kids are gonna be completely separated from the high schoolers, we’ll have lunch at different times, we’ll be in different spaces,” Guandique explained.

The Success Academy model incorporates play, sports, and arts into every child’s day.

“We focus a lot on chess,” Guandique said. “It teaches our kids how to be strategic, how to think ahead of their opponent and also how to be confident in their decision-making.”

Guandique is confident Success Academy will be a popular option here. The school district has no choice, a state law allows privately-operated, public charter schools to set up at so-called “low performing schools.” Miami-Dade County Public Schools superintendent Rafael Villalobos points out his A-rated district no F or D-rated schools. 

“I’ve got to make sure that we have the better product and although I know that we do, we’ve gotta make sure that we go out there and parents see that also,” Villalobos said. 

Success Academy is setting up at Westland Hialeah, Homestead, North Miami, Hialeah-Miami Lakes, and Jackson Senior High Schools. They’re paying the district $700 per student to cover maintenance and other costs. 

“But that’s nowhere near the cost of running a school,” said Antonio White, president of the United Teachers of Dade. 

White said charter schools don’t have a magic formula to educate kids, the traditional Miami-Dade public schools have more programs and choice options than any charter school operator, and, he says, the co-location arrangement is a Tallahassee-mandated gift to a competing school system. 

“So it’s like we’re putting the fox in the henhouse,” White said. “You put them inside traditional public schools, basically at taxpayer expense, right, we’re running two different type systems in the same location and only one of them is paying for it.”

Success Academy already co-locates at dozens of schools in New York, so they are confident they can work out the logistical issues of sharing a campus with a high school. Unlike some charter schools, Success provides English language instruction for kids who need it, uniforms are free, and so is aftercare, every day until 5:20pm. 

To accommodate Success Academy, Westland Hialeah had to sacrifice its media center. They had to convert it to classroom space to make up for the classrooms now being used by their new charter school partners.