The Leaves Continue To Turn
 
In addition to continuing to offer an excellent college preparatory education, there are many areas of growth that will occur during our fourth year of operation as well as into the future.

First Graduating Class
The school will be graduating its first class in June of 2008.  Our Director of College Guidance has already met with a majority of the first graduating class to begin to prepare for senior year responsibilities, activities, and planning for the future beyond WCHS.  88% of the original cohort will graduate on schedule, 88% with a Regents Diploma, and 19% with an Advanced Regents Diploma.

 

Final Year of Growth
The school will complete its original growth plan with the addition of a freshman class of approximately 150.  This will bring the total school enrollment up to 600 students in grades 9 -12, which is its charter designated capacity.

Accountability and Assessment
With the increased national demand for accountability and attention on student achievement, particularly at the high school level, we will be adding the position of Director of Assessment and Accountability to aid in strengthening our curriculum, defining goals and benchmarks for accountability, and creating a robust and rigorous educational experience for all of our students.


Partnership for Innovation
In June of 2007, WCHS was chosen to join the Partnership for Innovation in Compensation for Charter Schools (PICCS) along with nine other charter schools. PICCS is a five-year project that is helping New York City charter schools recruit, retain, develop, and reward top quality teachers and school leaders. Funded through a $10.5 million Teacher Incentive Fund grant from the United States Department of Education, PICCS is designed to serve as a model for using performance-based compensation systems to drive increases in student performance. PICCS is a project of the Center for Educational Innovation - Public Education Association (CEI-PEA), a New York-based nonprofit organization.

Getting the Word Out
Starting in the 2007-2008 school year, we will begin a full length documentary project and produce a full length book on our experiences, telling the unique story of the Williamsburg Charter High School.

More Room to Grow
Entering our fourth year, we have expanded our educational services and are looking to establish a permanent home for our students and future generations of students.  We have begun the planning process and hope to be in a new school building by the fall of 2010. To accomplish this we have engaged Civic Builders, New York's only non-profit developer of charter schools. A capital campaign, spearheaded by our new Director of Development will also begin immediately in order to support these efforts. 


Challenges in the Future
All schools, but particularly charter schools must deal with the increasing problem of continued inequities in funding, making the need to fundraise considerable amounts of money that much more dire.  No Child Left Behind and heightened issues of accountability - both fiscally and educationally - put even further stress on charter schools. In addition to other challenges such as being more susceptible to political change, single entity charter schools face a small, but vocal contingent of people who would deride them as a viable alternative to traditional public education.


Despite this difficult landscape, we continue to plan for what promises to be a bright future. In order to anticipate these hurdles, we are continually increasing our instructional, fiscal, and operational capabilities and infrastructure to provide an outstanding education for every child that attends our school.