Teachers to teach teachers at Macon Charter Academy; school officials expect to open on time

Teachers will be teaching other teachers at Macon Charter Academy this school year.

The new “professional learning community” will allow teachers to share their strengths with each other rather than having an outsider help with improvement, Principal Georgia Gary said at a called board meeting Thursday night.

“One teacher may have strength in classroom management, so then that teacher will do a professional development for the teachers in the building,” Gary said. “One teacher may be extremely gifted and strong in teaching strategies, pedagogy. … Everybody will come to the table with different strengths.”

School administrators will meet with teachers to find out what they’d like to learn and where they think they could improve, she said.

Starting on Monday, students will get to experience how professionals dress for success for the school’s new “business Mondays,” when all students are to wear their school blazers and uniforms.

“We want to start sending the image out that our students are scholars,” Gary said. “Boys will wear neckties or bow ties and girls will wear their Macon Charter Academy little ties as well.”

In other business, MCA co-founder Monya Rutland addressed news of students’ performance on the Georgia Milestones test. The charter school had a lower percentage of students who tested “proficient” on the assessment than Bibb County’s overall percentage in 20 of the 24 Georgia Milestones content areas.

“As a first-year charter school, we are not going to be positioned or pitted against the district that has been existence for decades, whose history speaks for itself,” Rutland said. “As a first year charter school, our scores for this year … form a base line. So, from there, we can use that as one of the many tools that we use to evaluate our scholars.”

While many new and different initiatives are planned for the school year, MCA faces an Aug. 18 termination hearing before the state school board. The termination process had been set to begin in early May after the state found issues with the school’s governance and operations, including teacher training, but a reorganization filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court delayed that time line.

In mid-June, former board member Linda Smyth told The Telegraph that the school would need 630 students enrolled to be able to open in August and stay open. Only 321 students were enrolled at MCA as of Thursday afternoon, according to district records.

However, Rutland was unwavering when asked about whether the school would be able to open.

“If we had one student, we’re starting,” Rutland said. “The teacher-student ratio would be off-the-chain. … We don’t plan to close our doors except at night and on the weekends.”

This story was originally published July 28, 2016 at 9:16 PM with the headline "Teachers to teach teachers at Macon Charter Academy; school officials expect to open on time."