Most authorizers will need some time to make NACSA’s suggested improvements to their new school application process. Here are some ideas on where to start.
1. Focus on the vision for your portfolio.
New school applications are just the first step in providing a broader array of high-quality school options for students and families. Updating your process to align with your vision for your portfolio requires clearly defining priorities with input from the community and communicating that vision, especially in the RFP.
How to start: Define (or refine) your vision and priorities. Ask: What are the needs and aspirations of our communities? How do we know? Given that, what do we want our portfolio to look like? What priorities do we want to focus on? How is our current process helping or hindering our vision? How can our process evolve to better support our vision?
2. Focus on the people.
Take steps immediately to focus on the people behind the plan—the charter school founding team—and their capacities to realize their plan. We can help.
How to start: Review NACSA’s resource The Capacities of Charter School Founding Teams: How to Identify and Assess for School Success. Identify the capacities you want to focus on, plan for assessing them, and make the needed changes to your process to do so.
Read and hear how the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools did just that.
3. Eliminate redundant items.
Often, an RFP will ask for a description of a policy and the actual policy itself. For example, an application may require the submission of a code of ethics or conflict of interest policy, and the applicant must also “describe the board’s ethical standards and procedures for identifying and addressing conflicts of interest.” Authorizers can determine if requiring both provides additional value.
How to start: Review your application for areas where a written response and an additional exhibit/attachment on the same topic are required. Identify redundant items that can be eliminated or moved to another part of the process. Use this guidance and NACSA’s Ready to Open Playbook and Criteria.
4. Leverage assurances to manage legal compliance.
It is important that applicants know their legal responsibilities. However, application questions that prompt a restatement of publicly available legal language won’t necessarily mean the applicant team has the capacity to manage these issues; it also won’t provide the information an authorizer needs to truly assess capacity. Authorizers can utilize assurances to document an acknowledgement of legal obligations and then lean more into the founding team’s capacities to execute on those obligations through other touchpoints.
How to start: Identify application questions that typically just require legal information (e.g., answering questions about the minimum insurance coverages a school will hold when there is already a legal minimum standard). Use an assurance to document an applicant’s acknowledgement of those requirements and hold them accountable. Build these accountability checks in to the process, likely during the Ready to Open stage or first year of operation site visits. See NACSA’s New School Application: Sample Statement of Assurances.
5. Align the application to how schools actually develop.
Look for items required in the written application that don’t align to a school’s actual development. Written applications can be submitted 1.5-2 years in advance of a school opening; at that stage, for example, many schools haven’t yet created a full curriculum scope and sequence or full student or faculty handbooks. Utilize a robust RTO process to ensure this documentation is in place on a timeline that makes most sense for operationalizing the school and ensures there are opportunities to intervene or delay opening if a developing school is not on track.
How to start: Use your own knowledge of school start-up and talk to school developers or past applicants to understand which RFP items are fully developed at the application stage, and which are not. Align your full process (including RTO) to the school development process, and shift items as necessary. See NACSA’s Ready to Open Playbook.
6. Critically examine opportunities to eliminate questions and other requirements.
Take a hard look at what is absolutely necessary at this stage and eliminate items in your RFP that are unnecessary or overly burdensome. This is the hard part. Eliminating items does not mean they aren’t important. They may have been critical at one time but are not essential anymore or may not be absolutely necessary at this stage to approve or deny a new school. For example, even if teacher professional development is important to a school’s success, is it necessary to know the PD plan to approve a new school?
How to start: Determine what you need a founding team to demonstrate for approval. Identify any items explicitly required by your state first; then, focus your efforts on items you can actually adjust. (If there are legal requirements that don’t make sense anymore, determine if you want to pursue changes to law or policy.) Use the model criteria and questions in this guidance to be thoughtful, but critical, about what you have the flexibility to remove from the written application or assess in different ways.
