Lydia Cook
ENT 601 – SME Interview
Renee Owen is a dedicated professional, serving the needs of all children. Currently she the Executive Director for the Rainbow Community and Omega School in Asheville, NC. Before arriving in Asheville, Ms.Owens founded and led Paradox Valley charter school in southwestern Colorado. Since getting involved with education, Ms. Owens has accomplished a great deal in providing a valuable education to the communities she has been involved with. I wanted to invert view Ms. Owens based on her detailed experience with developing and leading a charter school as well as stepping into the role as an executive director for a private school. Ms.Owens shared me with her unique journey as an entrepreneur and friendly advice on preparing my journey as I prepare to open a charter school. It was a pleasure speaking with Ms.Owens and I hope you enjoy and become enlightened through her experience.
Interview with Ms. Owens:
How did you first get interested in the education field?
Through the school that I started in paradox. Well, my first interest was when I did some substitute teaching at the high school level (actually more than high school) in Moab, Utah. I thought wow, this is really fun but I wasn’t really dedicating myself to education at that time. When my oldest daughter was about to be in 1st grade, it was actually someone else’s idea to start a school but I took it and ran with it. I was hooked and there was no way I was letting go. So the idea of having the school… it’s really hard to explain and I’m sure many entrepreneurs have the same experience, I can’t really explain why I was pushing so hard and why I wouldn’t give up on the idea of having the school; I just knew the school had to be opened. It wasn’t even my idea or that I needed the school for my own kids.
What inspired you to pursue opening up your a charter school in Colorado? Why did you decide on charter instead of private?
There’s a big difference. The character school is a public school so it’s free [for the students], you get government funding for each child. You have less of the bureaucratic aspects of the regular public school; you do not have teacher unions, you don’t have to pay the teacher the same as the district, but you do have to do all of the same testing. You can create your own curriculum, unlike where the district has certain ways of doing things and policies. The charter school does its own thing, it is its own model but with the same standards, but that little bit of freedom is a big difference. Since we were in the middle of nowhere, we really did whatever we wanted to anyways. Whereas a private school has nothing to do with the government and you can do whatever you want.
Was opening up the school a team effort? If so, what other types of professionals did you have on your team?
No professionals. There just weren’t any professionals that lived in that remote place. It was mostly parents, grandparents, and some community members that didn’t have kids. There were zero professionals on that team, no educational professionals.
What were the greatest obstacles you overcame in founding the charter school?
There weren’t many obstacles. Everything went great, we opened in four months. Everything fell into place. What should have been the biggest obstacles was the district, but it ended up not being an obstacle – it was amazing. Back then there was no option in opening up a character school directly with the state, the district had to approve it. So you can imagine how contentious that was for so many charter schools that would to go to their district; they would all be “no you’re not going to open another school in our district to take away from our district schools”. Later on the laws changed where charter schools could open directly through the state board of education.
There was this big three ring binder that the Colorado League of Charter Schools gave us. They give it to people who want to start a charter school, it includes all the information they need to know. After the school opens, you’ll be a part of this big professional organization that would support charter schools, offer conferences and trainings on pedagogy, and keeps everyone up to date on new laws. So, they had this big binder on how to start a character schools and we just followed that.
I was the one that wrote the charter for the school. I actually had a newborn baby at the time, so I transcribed it, I verbally said everything and this wonderful young lady typed everything. When our team presented that to the district, at their district meeting, it was like a small miracle-they passed it. There were a few different reasons: there are two things you submit 1 is the charter – which is what your mission, vision, how are you going to assess the students, what are you going to do for lunch, transportation, what kind of building, and all those facets of it which was about 20-25pages. The other thing you have to have is a contract with the district. You work with them to figure out what they are willing to do and then you write up this big long legal contract stating what the district is going to provide and what you are going to provide. There was some academic stuff in there too, you have to prove you’re going to be accredited and follow the rules. That was a 22 page document and it’s a big legal document. There were no professionals on this team, there’s no attorneys, I’m not an attorney, and I’m not an educator. I had a copy of the Colorado state laws and there’s a whole volume on the state educational laws. And once I again I had a 13 week old baby – my 3rd child, I would just laid in bed and read that law book for like two weeks solid. I figured I needed to know the laws to write the character because every charter school gets to waive some laws. That’s kind of the point of the charter. All the district schools get have to follow every single law and character schools waive some, and how would I know what to waive if I didn’t know the laws? Once again, I was SO motivated that it wasn’t like “uh, I have to read this law book”, I was going to read that law book! I took notes and THEN I realized that in the 3 ring binder there was a template – most charter schools all waive the same exact laws. But I’m glad I read the law book in the process because when we went to propose our character to the district every question they asked I would quote statute back “well the law says this, this, and this”. This was a really small remote place with really undereducated people and this school board had an area of 1500 people and 3 really huge liquor stores. The board make was not… it might have been a professional or two but was also largely people like a guy that worked at the coal plant. They didn’t really know quite what to do with that [her quoting the law]. We just got really lucky because the superintendent of that district, for a few years and that particular year was pro charter because she wanted to open an alternative high school because so many kids from there do not graduate from high school. So, she just happened to be in a pro charter mind set and the board chair was a friend of hers. It was an unbelievable window of grace that we got the charter school pasted. I know you want to hear about the obstacles, but I mean, of course there were obstacles; I had to read the state law book but it was mostly just getting acquainted with things. It was amazing how doors would just open, open, and open. Things we didn’t even know we needed would just show up when we needed it.
The biggest obstacles was hiring teachers now that I think about it. We were out in the middle of nowhere and there were no teachers. There were a couple teachers that lived and worked at the district schools and they were not going to give up their public teaching jobs to come work at the charter – that’s for sure. We weren’t going to be able to pay very well either, it was a little tiny budget – our first budget was like $98K for the year. We put out that we needed 3 teachers – really 2.5 because one was just going to work in kindergarten as an assistance teacher. We only hired one actual trained teacher and he was amazing; boy did we get lucky because he was the only person that applied that had the credentials. There was this woman that was just like a grandma who we trained but that didn’t go very well. We would just have to train people from the community; even people that didn’t even have a year of college, we were training them to be teachers. People were just not going to move to this place to take a teaching job, even first year teachers.
What would be some words of wisdom to pass along to someone interested in starting their own charter/private school?
Well there’s not any secretes about it. You just have to be passionate about what you want to do; you don’t have to know why you’re passionate about it. You can’t be logical about it because there’s no logical reason why anyone would put their self through that much work. You need to at least kind of know that in the beginning: that come hell or high water you’re going to do this and there’s no point in really starting it unless that’s your attitude about it. That this is going to happen no matter what and no one is going to get in our way (or my way) cause there will be so many reason to give up. Like I said, when it got really hard is when we opened and that’s because we opened so fast. If we would have been planning it for a year and half all those challenges would have come before we opened but we just wrote the charter and BAM. Probably because we were so little and we already had a building (and for most people finding a facility would be a difficult thing). Out building was abandoned, it had been closed for years, an old school building that the district still owned. That’s the main piece of advice that I would give them.
The other one is, I had to – I mean we had a team but, I kind of had to do things single handedly on a lot of levels just because it was such a remote place. We brought in anyone willing to help out in anyway. The whole thing wouldn’t have started without a team, I didn’t say let’s start a school, it was a team but I just ended up having the capacity to write and really study the documents. I ended up being the first executive director because of that; I wrote the budget and everything.
I guess one of the most important things is that the reason why we survived and made it is because we really engaged with the local community, especially with the people that thought it was kind of questionable. We really started our first big project, it was call the Paradox Pioneer Padgett. The kids went out and did oral history interviews with some of the older folks in the community. It was a lot of the older folks that were kind of negative but they just loved that. Then we had what we called a Padgett, it was where the kids acted out some of the stories or sang songs about them and told stories. It was like a variety show based on these stories as well as interactive things, like a bartering table with things they would have had back in the pioneer days. We even had a test your Paradox history both, where we had a jar and you could put in a dollar to test your knowledge and whoever answered the most questions won – which were, of course, the oldest living couple from Paradox. There was a fire and some homemade pioneer food. That seem obvious I guess, but you really have to know your community and know the people that won’t be interested in the charter school – what is it, why are they against it? what do they want? And really try to engage them.
