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New Charter School Gives Education & Welfare Aide
When most charter school backers talk about improving government bureaucracies, they just mean a single bureaucracy. The founders of a new charter school are pledging to change two.
The Mott Haven Academy Charter School in the Bronx, set to open this August, will tackle the problems of not just the public schools, but also of the welfare system.
The idea is to pool two government services, already being paid for with taxpayer money, into one place — a $30 million facility in the South Bronx opening in two years, with one wing for teachers to teach school, and another for case workers to dole out extras such as tutoring, yoga classes, and lessons in personal responsibility. The result, the school’s founders say, could be to revolutionize the way the government tackles poverty, giving the public better results for the same buck.
“The city’s paying me to do this in Mott Haven, so what we’re going to do is, just do it much more efficiently,” William Baccaglini, the executive director of the child welfare agency sponsoring the school, the New York Foundling, said.
Two-thirds of the school’s seats will be reserved for children in the welfare system.
Mr. Baccaglini said the merging would help both schools and welfare workers.
“Kids come in hungry, kids come in with dirty uniforms on, kids come in late and sleepy — those kinds of issues can eat up your day,” Mott Haven’s founding principal, Jessica Nauiokas, a former teacher and assistant principal, said.
With caseworkers a phone call or walk down the hall away, Ms. Nauiokas said teachers would be freed to focus solely on academics.
Other public schools try to build support for students beyond school hours.
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