Anson County could have a new option for education in 2018, when Anson Charter Academy expects to open its doors.
Former state senator Eddie Goodall, an advocate for charter schools in North Carolina, said he and a team of founding board members have been working to complete the application for the charter by the state deadline.
“I had not planned on doing this, but they came to me,” he said. “So with a couple of other people, we talked about leading the first charter school in Anson County. They indicated that the schools there were suffering academically and that parents did not have local choice or options. And so we started developing a board and some plans, and we’re working on the application now.”
Applications for charter schools must be received by Sept. 16, Goodall said.
“Three or four weeks ago, Brian Johnson — a member of the Anson school board — and Willie Owens, Mark Perko and Mellisa Davis became founding board members,” he explained. “Mellisa works for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction as part of the virtual public school. She’s the quality assurance and resource coordinator.”
Goodall — whose company, Goodall Consulting, has provided accounting services for charter schools across the state for more than 20 years — said the team is aiming to start two schools under a single charter. One would be located in Wadesboro, and the other in Monroe.
“We’re doing something unique because of the economy and scale,” he said. “We’re stretching our dollars further. We will apply for both schools at the same time. These two schools we would consider ‘sister schools,’ in that there would be similar programs and operational processes.”
According to the biography on his company’s website, Goodall is “…a two-time charter-founding board member and a former state senator who was the primary sponsor of twelve bills supporting charter schools between 2005 and 2010. He is a former CPA and managed his two CPA practices for nearly 30 years. For the last six years he headed the N.C. Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the N.C. Public Charter Schools Association.”
“We developed Union Day School that opened two weeks ago,” he said. “I was vice chair of Union Academy. I had heard over several years a real interest in having the charter school, especially in East Monroe where the demand is probably great.”
Charter schools, Goodall said, help bridge a gap between students the state classifies as “at-risk” and the quality education required to meet their needs.
“We have students who are behind there,” he explained. “They have ‘challenged populations’ as we know them. Charter schools really lift the quality of all schools. We want to provide an option for parents to be able to choose what they want. We’ll provide buses, have representation in the community and make sure we are accessible to those needing to get to and from schools. We want to reach out to the Hispanic community and others who might not know a lot about charter schools.”
Another point Goodall drove home was that charter schools are public schools — not private schools.
“They are free and open to anyone who applies,” he said. “If applications exceeded the number of students we could have, we would have a lottery in that case. We will start with (kindergarten through second grade) and add a grade a year and 50 students per year, until we ultimately have about 300 students. If it’s successful and the parents wanted to, we could apply for a middle and high school later.”
Wadesboro is the targeted area, Goodall said.
“We want a diverse school and we want people to know these are free schools and anybody can apply,” he said. “Our board is passionate about advocating choice. We believe children learn differently at different ages. Lower school students are at an age when they absorb facts very well, so we look at that pedagogy. And Davis works with quality and digital education.”
He said Dr. Rosemary Stein of Greensboro, who ran for NCDPI superintendent, is also a board member, adding that each member of the board has unique skills to bring to the new charter schools.
“We would like to ideally work with the school system,” he said. “It can be a little challenging. In our application, we want to sell the school. We wouldn’t be opening until August of 2018. We would love to start assimilating a group and maybe even taking job applications in the future.”
A telephone message left for Anson County Superintendent Michael Freeman was not returned before press time.
To contact Goodall about Anson Charter Academy, send email to wegoodall@gmail.com.
Reach reporter Melonie McLaurin at 910-817-2673 and follow her on Twitter @meloniemclaurin.com.
