Schools

New Charter School Plan Approved

The Temecula school board gives the go-ahead to lease rooms at the district's headquarters to a charter school.

A new charter school got permission today to open classrooms at the district's warehouse.

The Temecula Valley Unified School District Governing Board approved a memorandum of agreement with Context Charter School to lease 16 rooms at the on Rancho Vista Road.

About 200 people crowded the board room and an overflow room today to speak in support of the new school.

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Context offers a more creative way to learn, some parents said.

Luke Young, a Temecula resident for nine years, said the school is the perfect fit for his sixth-grade daughter, Jessica.

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"She's a hands-on learner, part engineer, part entrepreneur," he told the board during the meeting.

He explored putting his daughter in private school, but then he learned about Context. "We saw a program that doesn't teach to tests."

Neither board members nor audience members voiced opposition. "Anything that gets 300 students excited about school is a good thing," said Trustee Kristi Rutz-Robbins.

The memorandum memorialized an agreement the district extended to the new school on July 15, according to Lori Ordway-Peck.

The school will pay three percent of its apportionment in lieu of paying rent for 12 of its rooms. It will pay 60 cents per square foot for the other four, Ordway-Peck wrote in a report.

How the school is different

Context aims to emphasis music, agriculture and inter-disciplinary learning more than other schools, said Todd Morano, the school's director of education.

Class will be held five days a week and offer instruction in every grade. It will follow the California Content Standards, Morano said.

It breaks from other schools by allowing teachers two preparation periods to build interdisciplinary lesson plans. Teachers at other schools get only one prep period.

"Interdisciplinary teaching has been proven to succeed, but the reason it fails is a lack of planning," the director of education said.

It also breaks students into "smaller learning communities," groups of only a few students, and teaches "inquiry-based" lessons, encouraging students to ask questions and find their own answers, he said.

"As we work through the content, teachers direct students to ask questions and find those answers," he said.

Agriculture and art

The school will also emphasis agriculture and art.

Starting tomorrow, the school plans to move into its offices in a barn on Los Alamos in Murrieta. The owners of the barn donated its use not only for office space, but to run an agricultural and geological program, Morano said.

"We're going to teach how folks in the 1800s did topography," he said.

Also, Fender, a guitar manufacturer, agreed to donate musical equipment for a music program possible, the director of education said.

Can it compare with public schools?

The superintendent defended the performance of the district's established schools.

"Yes, through budget cuts we've had to eliminate programs... we all feel are important," Superintendent Timothy Ritter said at the end of the meeting. "The bottom line is, we're doing fabulous things for our students."

The new charter school has 16 staff members and is the district's fourth charter school.

"We've demonstrated we believe students deserve choices in their education," Ritter said. "Maybe I have a little bit of thin skin, but I want to stand up and say we're proud of the Temecula Valley Unified School District."

Uncertain start date
Some improvements the district plans to make on the classrooms may push back Context's start date, according to the agreement.

"It is foreseeable that the district improvements may slightly impact Context's projected start date," the agreement reads.

The completion date of the improvements will be known only after the contractors and architects finish their evaluations, the agreement states.

To read the agreement, click on the photo gallery above.


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