The real estate trade has a technical term for locations that never seems to work out for businesses locating there: snakebit.
If there’s been a snakebit location for public schools in Baton Rouge, it’s the old Prescott Middle.
We hope that a new charter school operator will be successful at Prescott Middle’s campus. Clearly, it won’t be easy: Poverty among student families is rife. Available resources are not unlimited, even to charter systems that have operated successfully in other places.
A respected outfit, Democracy Prep, surrendered its charter after seven years and many academic problems. The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, often divided lately on other issues, unanimously granted a charter to Third Future Schools, inheriting about 500 students on the campus.
Third Future has drawn attention for trying to make high teacher pay and plentiful support for them a key part of its formula; customized instruction is part of its mantra, for both successful students and those struggling.
”We come around today with humility to say that we are turnaround experts and we have done this several times before, but we have no illusions about how tough this is going to be,” Mike Miles, CEO and founder of Third Future, told BESE members March 7.
Miles noted the success his organization has had turning around three of its Texas schools in just one to two years. He said school turnaround in Baton Rouge can happen just as fast.
”We have to destroy the myth that it takes four or five years to turn around a school,” Miles said. ”Our kids don’t have that kind of time.”
Perhaps. While Prescott Middle’s campus has a track record, the children there deserve every chance.
Maybe Third Future will provide it. We hope so.
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