Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell says a walk to school event he attended last month at Paragon Mills Elementary School in honor of civil rights activist Ruby Bridges really illustrates the city’s challenges getting around.The school is situated adjacent to Harding Place, which is known for dangerous wrecks.

This year nine potential charter operators met the February 1 deadline to file an application to open a new public charter school.School board members in Memphis, Nashville, and Rutherford County will vote on those applications later this spring, and any parents who are interested in them now have access to an independent evaluation of the proposed schools.Education advocacy organization Tennesseans for Student Success (TSS) launched this year’s edition of the Quality Charter Review on Monday with an evaluation of each application’s academic, operations, and financial plans. The review also provides an outline of each proposed school's strengths and needed improvements.

Eight State Representatives who currently don’t have public charter schools in their home counties played a crucial role in advancing a bill to support the more than 40 thousand students who do attend those schools elsewhere.Representatives Ryan Williams, Cookeville; Mark Cochran, R-Englewood; Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby; David Hawk, R-Greeneville; Patsy Hazlewood, R-Signal Mountain; Tim Hicks, R-Gray; Jerome Moon, R-Maryville; and Charlie Baum, R-Murfreesboro all voted in favor of legislation designed to provide better school facilities to charter students at Wednesday’s House Finance, Ways, and Means Subcommittee. The vote was considered to be one of the larger hurdles the bill will face this session.The legislation would require local school districts that have public charter schools in them to provide a list of vacant and underutilized buildings on an annual basis. Under the bill, school districts would additionally be required to make those properties available to public charter schools at a fair market value and give charters a first right of refusal for either purchase or lease.“There are school buildings that are also vacant or underutilized all across the state but often access to these buildings is extremely difficult if not impossible. Instead, charter schools in Tennessee must finance, locate, build, update, or renovate facilities to use as school buildings,” said bill sponsor Representative Williams.Supporters say the legislation will go a long way towards helping with the facilities funding gap charters across the state are facing. A recent report by the organization ExcelinEd found current state funding is only meeting 50 percent of charter facilities needs and this gap is expected to grow to just 42 percent of facility needs met in five years as more families choose to send their children to public charter schools.This gap also disproportionately impacts economically disadvantaged students and students of color because public charter schools serve a higher percentage of those student groups.Finding a building harder than finding staffThe challenge of finding a building is one STRIVE Collegiate Academy founder LaKendra Butler remembers well from when she founded her school nearly a decade ago in Nashville’s Donelson community. Butler says finding vacant space was more difficult than finding staff to work there.“There wasn’t a ton of spaces in this area that we could utilize so we had to be creative,” said Butler. “The search of a space was clearly impossible.”Butler ended up reaching an agreement to lease space in a building that used to be a hospital.STRIVE has since built out the second floor of the building to serve as a middle school but there have been obstacles to overcome, including a lack of outdoor space for children and classrooms with structural pillars in inconvenient places.Butler says it was luck that made the space possible.“We just so happened to communicate with a community member who had space. It’s not that we found the building, it was we found the person who then was like, oh I may have some space that works,” said Butler.The Tennessee Senate passed the charter facility bill earlier this month on a 23 to 1 vote. It now heads to the full House Finance, Ways, and Means Committee.

Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) Director Dr. Adrienne Battle told Nashville business leaders the district’s recent national recognition for learning loss recovery followed strategic changes to better serve students.Speaking to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce Monday, Battle said the district has focused on key changes in recent years, including doubling down on the district’s Tier 1 instruction focus on high quality instructional materials and ensuring the district is operating with a common curriculum at all schools.

Lauren Herring’s daughter spent two years at her zoned middle school before being accepted into Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet School.Herring says she desperately wanted her daughter to thrive at her zoned school, however it soon became clear that her academic needs, which demanded more robust and rigorous educational experiences, would not be met there.

Chronic absenteeism has been an ongoing issue for public schools nationwide and it only increased following the pandemic.LEAD Academy in Nashville was no exception.To combat the issue, the public charter high school took an aggressive and comprehensive approach by implementing a new set of strategies that led to a drop in the number of chronically absent students from 42 percent in the 2021/2022 school year to 22 percent last year.

State Representative Justin Jones, D-Nashville, represents a district that touches four school clusters with some of the highest performing public charter schools in Nashville.Those charters in east and southeast Nashville include a dozen that outscored the average grade district run public schools received in their cluster on the state’s School Letter Grades assessment. The remaining public charter schools scored equal to the cluster average and 40 percent of the Reward schools in these four clusters are charters.

LaKendra Butler moved to Nashville a decade ago with the goal of starting a public charter school.At the time Butler was the principal of a middle school in Dallas and she saw an opportunity to help put students in the Donelson and Hermitage communities of Davidson County on the path to become college-ready high school graduates.

Abby McLean’s children are among those who survived last March’s Covenant school shooting that claimed the lives of three children and three staff members.McLean read a letter from Erin Kinney, the mother of Covenant victim William Kinney, to members of the Senate Education Committee in support of Senator Ferrell Haile’s, R-Gallatin, bill to change fire alarm policies in schools.The bill would require each school district, public charter school, private school, and church-related school to create a policy for how students, teachers, faulty, staff, and substitute faculty should respond when a fire alarm is activated outside of scheduled drills.

Vanderbilt professor and researcher Jason Grissom told members of the Metro Nashville Board of Education that the nationwide recognition the district is getting for how students recovered from the pandemic didn’t come by accident.Grissom said thinking on two levels is what made it work. That includes the direct instructional intervention district leaders spearheaded, like investing in high-dosage tutoring, and the indirect building systems to support instruction, including mental health and family engagement.

A new report produced by Harvard and Stanford Universities known as the Education Recovery Scorecard, credits MNPS for surpassing national trends for pandemic recovery.The research found MNPS ranked third among the top 100 districts in math growth from 2022 to 2023 and the district is ranked sixth among the top 100 districts in reading (English language arts) growth during that same period. The district was one of just two large urban school districts to rank in the top ten for both subjects.

Victavia Walls says she made the wrong choice in middle school to temporarily leave LEAD Brick Church for her traditionally zoned Metro Nashville school. Walls says the experience at the new school wasn’t what she hoped for so she transferred back to LEAD the following year.She's among the nearly half a dozen parents and students who shared their experiences to support LEAD Brick Church's effort to remain open as a public charter school.

The Tennessee Public Charter School Commission unanimously approved Nashville Collegiate Prep’s request to continue providing students its community classroom model into high school.The K-8 public charter school organizes each grade into a pod of 4 to 5 classes. Throughout the day students switch teachers within the pod based on their specific needs and strengths, providing teachers an opportunity to more directly focus lessons on the areas students might need help in.

Sara Vaneel says she chose to enroll her son in Rocketship Nashville Northeast Elementary School when he was entering kindergarten because she wanted him to have a different educational experience than she received.Vaneel says instead of staying with one teacher each day, her son has benefitted from the public charter school’s class rotation schedule, and he loves his coding and robotics classes.Vaneel’s son and his more than 500 classmates have all been at risk of losing what they enjoy about Rocketship since November when members of the Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) Board of Education voted against renewing the school’s charter. That decision threatened to close the school, but Rocketship appealed to the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission.Friday, commissioners unanimously voted to overturn the board’s decision and grant Rocketship another ten-year charter. It’s the latest in a series of decisions by commissioners to overturn MNPS board votes against public charter schools

Even under a best-case scenario, hundreds of Metro-Nashville Public School (MNPS) students will have to repeat the fourth-grade next year under a new state law.That’s according to district Executive Director of the Department of Research, Assessment, and Evaluation Christine Stenson, who updated members of the MNPS Board of Education Tuesday night on the potential impact Tennessee’s new Third-Grade Retention Law will have on district fourth-graders.

A key prediction that’s guiding Tennessee’s workforce development is the belief that the number of jobs requiring some form of credential or degree will grow at a higher rate than those requiring only a high school diploma.This could be especially true in Nashville and improving the pathways for students to earn those degrees and credentials is at the heart of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce’s four recommendations to improve K-12 education.

School boards in as many as six counties could vote on applications this year for new public charter schools.A diverse group of potential charter operators sent 21 charter application letters of intent to school districts across the state, the first step in this year’s new start charter application process. Those operators include an existing charter operator, prior applicants who failed to receive approval, along with a host of new organizations with no experience in Tennessee.A diverse group of potential charter operators sent 22 charter application letters of intent to school districts across the state, the first step in this year’s new start charter application process. Those operators include existing charter operators, prior applicants who failed to receive approval, along with a host of new organizations with no experience in Tennessee.

Faculty from Martin Luther King Jr. Magnet School pleaded with the Metro Nashville School Board Tuesday night to oppose a proposal to remove two middle school grades as part of the MNPS ReimaginED equity roadmap.That proposal would remove seventh and eighth-grade students from the school. One faculty member requested the district instead expand MLK to include sixth-grade.MLK school counselor Sarah Laos told school board told board members the building still has room to enroll more students and she worries phasing out the two grades means losing part of the faculty.

The majority of Nashville’s public charter schools received a better report card from the state than their traditional school counterparts in the Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) district.A Tennessee Firefly analysis of the recently released School Letter Grades found 62 percent of MNPS public charter schools scored a higher grade than similar traditional public schools averaged.