In 2005, Vielka McFarlane funded the first Celerity charter school in South Los Angeles by mortgaging her own house. Her mission was to give her under-served community access to a high-quality, research-based education. So far three Celerity schools have opened under her tutelage.
Name: Vielka McFarlane Title: Executive Director, President, Founder & CEO of Celerity Educational Group Education: B.A., Economics, CSU Los Angeles; M.A., Educational Administration, National University
Q: How did you find staff that you knew would have the necessary commitment to your project?
By being honest when we recruited. We needed teachers who could say, "I believe so much in this project and in this population that I am not afraid to give up my tenure and my guaranteed job and paycheck to go to this charter school that hasn't even opened." If a teacher could say this, we knew it was someone could break from traditional blaming the victim, who has experience with our population and understands their challenges.
Q: What practical qualities were you looking for in your teachers?
We needed a mix of new teachers and experienced teachers who would help brand new educators to structure their classrooms. We also needed them to be fully credentialed, experienced with technology, understand project-based learning, and have the ability to give our students authentic assessments.
Q: In what ways did your staff help create the plan for Celerity?
The months before we opened, we were working with them in terms of teaching them what our curriculum would be but as a team we were also creating what would be our school's culture. Because we were all new together, there was no culture to speak of. We spent the summer envisioning the culture we were going to create not only in theory but physically as well. We worked together to make our vision our reality and this was a team effort. We target and recruit the lowest achieving students; our test scores are not necessarily the highest. But we create an environment of hope by expecting a lot of our students. We have high expectations but they are realistic expectations. Some of our sixth grade students come in reading at a first grade level. We don't expect them to be caught up by the end of the year but we do expect them to up a year or two.
Q: How did you convince your community to get on board?
Before the school opened, we went to where the people of our community hang out; we looked for mothers because they are the primary caregivers. We went to churches and grocery stores and parks and beauty salons and then we went door to door and we had heart-to heart conversations with parents.While we were recruiting, the warehouse that was to house our school was a hardhat area. We set up shop literally on the sidewalk with fold out chairs, a 12 x 18 foot table, a cell phone and a computer. That was our office. Parents would come and we would say "Let me give you a tour of the facilities." We would bring them into this gutted out building and say, "Just think about the possibility of a school in which you have some say in how the curriculum is designed and which skills your child will learn." A week before school was set to start we had 100 students enrolled. By the days our doors opened, we had 331.
Q: What's been your greatest challenge?
Our greatest challenge is at the same time our greatest success. We recruit students who come from single-family homes, most of them below poverty level. Our students have had trouble in school for a long time, multiple times. And our neighborhood has all the challenges that come from poverty. We ask so much of our students' parents, who are very involved. We ask them to understand that we don't make excuses for ourselves so we don't allows our students to make excuses. We expect our school community to take responsibility for their own learning and themselves and for the community and for the rest of the world. But we make a bargain with our students and their parents. We say if you're going to come to school, we expect you to come ready to learn. We expect you to do your homework on time and every day. If you do that, we're going to give you the highest quality education you can have.
Dawn Friedman lives and writes in Columbus Ohio. Her work has appeared in Utne, Salon, Greater Good and Brain Child.
Q: How did you convince your community to get on board?
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