This series of articles were written by Chuck Stockwell, one of LDA/Charyl Stockwell Academy´s founders. The series it quite long but, it tells an important story of who we are as a school.

The first application I filed for a charter was in the name of Monroe Developmental Academy. In January of 1995 I was the principal of Monroe Elementary School in Wayne, Michigan. The school was a part of the Wayne Westland Community School District, a large school district on the west side of Wayne County. That month two parents from the school, Winona Smith, the president of the PTO, and Jeannette Huff, an active school supporter, came to me to ask me to help them start a charter school. In December of the previous year, after a year of study, the district had determined that it would close four elementary schools to save money. Monroe School was one of the oldest school buildings in the district, so it was chosen to be closed. The parents who came to me for help felt very strongly about their school. Even though it was old, the school sat in the middle of a changing neighborhood and provided a central focus for recreation and neighborhood support. They did not want it to be closed.

I came to Monroe School to be the principal just three years earlier, in the summer of 1992. I was the fifth principal the school had had in 8 years. When I came to the school I was starting a new chapter in my career as an educator. I started working in schools in 1970 as a summer recreation director in a private school for disadvantaged students who were brain damaged or who had serious emotional disturbances. Green Tree School was a very special place. It was located in two old mansions in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. At that time there were more private special education schools in Philadelphia than anywhere else in the world. Most of the schools had high tuition and catered to the wealthy families on the East Coast. Green Tree was run by Jewish Quakers as more of a social mission than a financial enterprise. Employees worked for low pay out of a commitment to children. We never had more than 12 students in a class, with a teacher and teaching assistant. We had a part time psychiatrist, a psychologist, a nurse, a music therapist, a movement therapist, an art therapist, a social worker, and a part time developmental optometrist. The school was committed to training its staff and every Monday we stayed late for training sessions. We pulled together as a team and cared for each other as a family. I worked at that school in Philadelphia for four years while I completed a BA in elementary education and graduate classes to become certified to teach special education. I was fascinated with Piaget and completed a major paper on Montessori’s work in Italy for one of my classes. My undergraduate thesis, required for graduation from Antioch College, was on the work of Ivan Illich, who wrote about Deschooling Society and Paulo Freire, who proposed a new kind of experience based pedagogy to liberate the oppressed people of the third world. My paper advocated for trying to save public education in the US through major school reform.

In 1975 I came back to Michigan where I had grown up and took a position as a consultant with the Intermediate School District in Big Rapids. I spent two years there developing a range of classroom, resource room, and consulting services for students with emotional impairments. In 1977 I moved to Lansing where I worked at the Ingham Intermediate School District as a Learning and Adjustment Specialist. During my two years there I developed a program for high school special education dropouts and provided consultation and staff training for special education teachers in 11 school districts. In 1979 I graduated from Michigan State University with a MA in school administration and learning disabilities.

That fall I was invited to join the Wayne Westland School District Administration as their first Director of Secondary Special Education. For the next 10 years I worked at developing and supervising a comprehensive set of programs and services in two high schools and four junior high schools for all kinds of special education students. Our programs were among the first in the nation to educate severely impaired students in regular secondary school environments. When students were able to work in regular classrooms, we created support services and alternative routes to graduation. For students who were unable to be integrated for instruction, we created parallel programs in regular school buildings, allowing for a maximum amount of social integration while still providing an appropriate alternative curriculum. Along with the academic program we developed and provided a comprehensive system of vocational evaluation, training, and job placement to assure that when our students left school they could go to work.

While working in Wayne Westland I attended Grand Valley College to get certified as a Director of Special Education and then completed all but the dissertation in a doctoral program in Educational Administration at Wayne State University. I did not finish that program because I ran and was elected as a reform candidate to the Board of Trustees of Wayne County Community College. At that time WCCC had lost its accreditation, had fired three Presidents in as many years, and was under the supervision of the State Superintendent of Education, Phil Runkel. As a trustee I worked closely with Dr. Runkel and other trustees to win back that accreditation. I headed a broad-based school and community task force to conduct a national search for a new president. We selected Ron Temple (who is now the chancellor of the Chicago system, the second largest in the nation) and headed WCCC back on the right track. Unfortunately, as soon as the school regained accreditation and was no longer under the supervision of the state superintendent, it reverted to its old ways. I left the board after my first four-ear term and Dr. Temple left the next year. The school today remains a small shadow of what it could be and is a tribute to the urban corruption that has plagued Detroit for three decades.

In 1990 I was ready for a new challenge. I had become disenchanted with special education. Despite all our efforts, more and more students were being identified each year as handicapped. With this identification came a tremendous increase in the cost of the students’ education and a huge increase in paper work and bureaucracy. In the 20 years I had worked in special education it had gone from a small program in private schools and church basements serving severely impaired children to a program that was the largest department in many school districts, serving between 10 and 15 percent of the student population. It alarmed me that so many students were being identified and that such a large portion of the general education budget was being redirected to this special service. Even more alarming was the evidence that repeatedly showed us that special education intervention was doing little to improve the educational outcomes for Learning Disabled and Emotionally Impaired students.

My superintendent asked me to take a new position to replace an administrator in failing health. For the next two years I ran an adult rehabilitation facility. The program had been started when there were large federal and adult education subsidies for such programs. It served adults who had been moved from large state institutions to community based group homes. We provided day activity, vocational training and job placement services to our clients. Without the federal subsidies we tried to keep the program alive by running it as a business. We sold services to the Department of Mental Health, Vocational Rehabilitation, and private agencies. The overhead that came with being associated with a school district was a major drain on our financial success. When I looked at our competition it was easy to see that they got a lot more for their staff dollars. Our school-type work rules drove up our costs and the high costs of benefits, such as a state mandated pension program that cost 18% of salary, made it impossible for us to compete. I closed the program for the district by selling it, along with the school building that housed it, to a private agency. It was an important lesson for me in business and helped me to see how public schools waste money. The superintendent liked the job I did and told me I could choose my next assignment. I decided I wanted to go back to my elementary school roots and asked to be an elementary school principal.

That brings us back to Monroe. I know that was a long digression but with good reason. Charter schools are about ideas. When Winona and Jeannette came to me I thought about their proposal awhile and then said, “Yes, I’ll help you start a charter school, but I have a condition. The school has to be designed like I want it to be designed.” I really didn’t think we would even get to the charter application stage, but I thought it would be fun, and useful, to think about and write down exactly what a school would look like if I had my way. In the next month I did just that, and essentially, LDA is what has resulted from that writing. Charter schools are about ideas, and the ideas that we are trying to implement at LDA were chosen by me. They are based on my experience. They are not all my ideas, but the way they are put together is my design. This is why I felt it was important to share with you the experience on which that design is based. There are two more experiences that led to the final look of LDA. Those are my family and my work at Monroe School. I’ll go over those next week along with the story of how we ended up in Livingston County instead of Wayne.

While I was working in Wayne-Westland I met, fell in love with, and married my wife Shelley. Shelley was working as a teacher of mentally impaired adults in a segregated special education program when we met. She worked with me to move the first class for Trainable Mentally Impaired (TMI) students, into Wayne High School. After we married, Shelley left Wayne-Westland and took a position as Supervisor of Special Education in the Lincoln Consolidated School District. One year later, she was appointed to be principal of Webster School in the Livonia School District. When she took over Webster it was a county center program for TMI children. One year later, the district decided to more fully utilize the building and moved in the district’s magnet program for Academically Talented children. Shelley became the principal for both programs and worked to build bridges between teachers, students and families. The school boasts a model functional academic curriculum for the mentally impaired children and an academically challenging, but holistic and developmentally appropriate program, for the gifted children. Shelley holds an undergraduate degree in Elementary and Special Education and Children’s Literature, a Masters Degree in Counseling, and the equivalent of a Masters Degree in Educational Administration.

I introduce Shelley here because I consider her a co-founder of LDA. She has not been actively involved in the school but her ideas and support for me have certainly influenced the design of the school. Since I met her years ago we have had almost daily discussions about education and child development. We have a debate about the effects of the MEAP test on education and school improvement, which I don’t think will ever be resolved. It was her work with the Gifted/Talented program at Webster that attracted me back to elementary education, and many of the concepts that are embedded in the design of LDA are borrowed directly from that program. Her ongoing education and exposure to the literature, research, and programs that drive GT programs have helped me keep abreast of the best practices in education.

This may seem like a lot of personal information, but I think it is important to share. Last week I said that charter schools are about ideas. They are also, almost always, started for very personal reasons. My personal reason is my family and in particular my daughter, Charyl. In 1986 Charyl joined our family. She was a healthy happy child and reached all developmental milestones on schedule. She attended a Montessori preschool at Madonna College when she was 3, and attended the Brighton Montessori Preschool when we moved to Brighton when she was 4. When she was 5, she went on to the Miller Kindergarten Center. Miller had a strong developmental approach at that time and I was very impressed by the school. I hold the principal, Barbara Gaines, in high regard. Charyl did well in school. Teachers reported that she was shy, but warmed up as the year went by. She had a September birthday so she was always one of the younger children in her class. Late in her kindergarten year she began to report headaches. We took her to our pediatrician who found nothing wrong.

When I started my first year at Monroe as an Elementary School Principal, Charyl started her first year at Hornung as a first grade student. What I found at Monroe School was a school that had been neglected. No principal in the previous 10 years had stayed for more than two years and several had come there to retire. The year before I was assigned Monroe had no principal but was covered part time by the principal in the next building. The teachers worked independently in their classrooms with little coordination. Some had been in the same classroom for 20 years, others had just been transferred in. Instruction was textbook and tradition driven. There were differences in the delivery of instruction in each class.

My first problem was discipline. The teachers wanted to stay in their classrooms and send their problems to the office. Each class had a different way of handling problems and the teachers wanted no change in that. I started looking around for an approach that would work. I had a strong behavioral background, but controlling behavior school wide without consistent school wide consequences would be impossible. The district was pushing a very coercive time out and structured interview procedure developed at Boys Town. Most of the teachers used the assertive discipline approach of three checks on the board and then you’re sent to the office. (Glasser calls this “Do what I say or I’ll hurt you.”) My first approach was to establish expectations for respect, and procedures and routines for hallway, playground, and lunchroom behavior. I brought in a video taped playground supervision-training program for lunch moms. I agreed to suspend for violence, but told teachers unless we had a pre-arranged agreement, when students were sent to me I would listen to all sides of the story, and I would determine the consequence. I worked with the school’s improvement team to institute a recess detention program combined with a school wide reward program. All of these things worked to some extent, but discipline was still a problem.

My experience and my search for solutions led me to the work of Jim Fay. Fay’s work is based on the most up-to-date information we have about child psychology, but he has old-fashioned ideas about the importance and integrity of adult leadership. He believes that adults have a responsibility to treat children with respect, to love children, and to provide arrangements that will allow children to experience logical consequences for their behavior. Fay proposes that school discipline be handled not with systematic school wide punishments, but rather with a staff agreement on how to treat children and approach problems. I also found the work of Harry Wong very useful. Wong, an experienced teacher, stresses classroom routines and procedures developed with the input of students. These procedures and routines act as quiet guides for student behavior. When the decision was made to close Monroe School, our staff was beginning the process of exploring and adopting these approaches. As you know these approaches have become a part of LDA.

Discipline was a piece of cake compared to the overwhelming task of school improvement that needed to occur at Monroe School. There was no apparent curriculum, textbooks that were never completed drove instruction, and half of the children were underachieving, some were several years behind. When I talked to teachers about what was wrong they blamed parents. The community was changing, parents weren’t involved, and parents were ignorant, they claimed. Children came to school not ready to learn because of what they experienced in their homes. The teachers saw little they could do to change the situation and thought the parents were a part of the problem not the solution. Fortunately the state had just instituted a requirement to form school improvement teams in each school. We would have to look at the problem.

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