A new charter school for foster kids aims to provide stability

Monument Academy, an innovative charter boarding school designed to serve children in foster care, opens in DC in August. The school will try to provide the stable family environment kids in the foster system often lack.

The school will open with 40 fifth-graders, divided into two classes. It will add one grade a year through eighth grade and eventually serve 160 students, with hopes of expanding through high school. During the week, students will live in groups of about ten, along with two house parents, in a home-like setting on school grounds.

Some have criticized the charter sector for not doing enough to serve children who are at-risk, pointing to the fact that, as compared to the traditional public school sector, fewer charter schools have high concentrations of at-risk students. But Monument Academy, like a few other charters, is taking on the education of at-risk students as its core mission.

If it’s successful, Monument could address the root causes of many of the difficulties schools with lots of at-risk students face: dysfunctional home environments and a lack of mental health services.

School co-founder and CEO Emily Bloomfield first conceived the idea for Monument after an incident within her own family. Relatives suddenly found themselves responsible for two grandchildren, aged five and six, both of whom had learning and emotional challenges. The grandparents were overwhelmed, and Bloomfield realized there was no institution that could help them.

She also began researching what generally happens to children in foster care and discovered that outcomes were “dismal.” A three-state study showed that by age 24, only 6% of foster care alumni had a two- or four-year college degree, and nearly a quarter hadn’t earned a high school diploma or GED. Nearly 40% had been homeless since leaving foster care.

Those figures roughly match the situation in DC, where the Children and Family Services Agency (CFSA) serves about 1,000 kids in foster care, along with another 2,000 receiving services in their homes. Bloomfield cites figures from 2012 showing that 65% of those in the foster care system here drop out of high school, and only 4% get a four-year degree.

Bloomfield has experience with education and charter schools, having served on the Santa Monica school board before moving from California to DC in 2007. In 2010, she began a four-year stint on the DC Public Charter School Board, the agency that authorizes charter schools here. Shortly after her term expired, Bloomfield submitted an application to found Monument Academy.

Family-style model

DC already has one charter boarding school, SEED, but Monument’s model will be different. Rather than having kids live in dormitories as they do at SEED, Monument will have them live family-style, with house parents.

Unlike SEED, Monument is specifically targeting children who haven’t had “the experience of consistency and stability,” Bloomfield said. The school wants to provide them with that, along with the social-emotional and life skills that will ultimately enable them to live independently.

Children will stay at the school in four-bedroom apartments from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon, returning to their families or caregivers for the weekend. Every morning, students will prepare breakfast with their house parents, set a personal goal for the day, and engage in some physical activity.

After school and afternoon extracurricular activities, they’ll return for dinner, followed by homework, communal activities, a reflection on the goal they set in the morning, and lights out at 9 p.m.

Preparing for students who have experienced trauma

Not all children at the school will be in the foster care system, but all will come from backgrounds of trauma and stress. In addition to providing each class of 20 students with two teachers and the half-time services of a special education teacher, Monument will employ three social workers for each grade level.

Supervising the social workers will be Dr. Melissa Smith, the school’s director of well-being, who was in foster care herself as a child and has also been a foster parent. A child psychiatrist at Georgetown University Medical Center, Dr. Matthew Biel, will visit the school weekly to provide support for both students and faculty.

Monument will also try to engage the families or guardians of its students, visiting their homes and inviting them to the campus for family events. Families will also have regular contact with teachers and house parents when dropping children off at school on Sundays and picking them up on Fridays.

Bloomfield says the school is committed to not suspending or expelling students, an experience many children at Monument are likely to have had before. While extreme behavior might call for a transfer to a more therapeutic setting, in cases of run-of-the-mill defiance the school will use techniques like restorative justice to try to get at the behavior’s underlying causes.

To plan for the school, Bloomfield and other Monument staff visited the Milton Hershey School in rural Pennsylvania, a free private boarding school for low-income children in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.

The Hershey School, established in 1909 by the founder of the chocolate company, has an endowment of over $9 billion. Among its amenities are four swimming pools, an ice hockey rink, and an equestrian program.

Monument Academy won’t have the resources to duplicate the entire Hershey experience. But the school is borrowing essential aspects of the model, including the house parent system, and Bloomfield says the staff here will make do with what they have.

“We don’t need an ice rink,” she says. “We have a rec center across the street. And we have all of Washington, DC.”

More funding than the average charter

Still, the school will have more resources than the average DC charter. In addition to the usual allocation of about $12,000 per student, Monument will get about $25,000 to cover the costs of boarding, as does SEED.

Monument students are also likely to fall into the at-risk category, which triggers another $2,000 per pupil. And Bloomfield anticipates that at least half will qualify for special education funding, which can be as much as $30,000 per student.

Bloomfield says public funding will cover most of the school’s costs, but she hopes to raise about $5 million to complete renovations and additions to the building, a former DC Public School building in Northeast DC.

The school has already enrolled about 30 students. They’ve been referred by the CFSA, school social workers, organizations that work with the homeless, and others in the community who knew good candidates.

Monument is attacking a daunting modern problem by reinventing an old institution: the orphanage. And it may be taking on an even greater challenge than the well-resourced Hershey School, which targets low-income students generally rather than at-risk ones and refuses admission to students with “serious behavioral problems.”

It’s too soon to know whether Monument’s approach will work. But judging from the thought and planning that’s going into launching the school, it stands a good chance of success.

Cross-posted at DC Eduphile.