Charter Schools

[David G]

If anyone is interested in investigating what it takes to setup a
French Charter School, you can email me and I'll put you in touch with
someone who helped spearhead an effort to setup a Russian centric
Charter School. This was attempted about 1 year ago. If my memory is
correct, turns out that the key challenges to making it happen in SF
are twofold:

1) the District wants a proven principal at the helm, and 2) the labor
unions will shut down the effort (via their influence at the board)
unless there are some union jobs.

As for challenge 2), I believe the issue was specifically the school
maintenance/janitorial jobs. That really shouldn't be a deal killer
because we're really talking about only a single position, but perhaps
I didn't hear the full story.

A FLEX program is much easier to put together.

I do have an off-the-wall idea. Notre Dame des Victoires Church and
Elementary School ( http://www.ndvsf.org/ ) has a French language,
Catholic education program. Perhaps they have space to allow a French
oriented Charter school to share their facilities. Once it grew to a
critical size, it could migrate to its own site.