New Tennessee Charter School Is Founded By Nun

By THERESA LAURENCE, CNS

Published: August 21, 2003

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (CNS) —A charter school, founded by a Franciscan nun and her sister, opened its doors to 225 kindergarten through fourth-grade students Aug. 11.

Nashville’s first charter school, Smithson-Craighead Academy, is located in a former Seventh-day Adventist school, and is still going through renovations.

“We’ll probably have to brown-bag our lunches for the first month,” said the school’s director, Franciscan Sister Sandra Smithson. But the administrators’ and teachers’ confidence in the school’s curriculum overshadowed most concerns about the building’s preparedness.

The school is named for its founders, Sister Sandra and her sister, Mary Craighead, both of whom are lifelong educators. It will be using a skills-based learning system that ensures students will not be passed to the next grade level until they have mastered all the subjects at their current grade level.

It will also use “Reading Success,” a program developed by Craighead, an educator for more than 50 years and a former principal at six Nashville public schools. She will be a curriculum consultant for the school.

The new charter school staff members are prepared to meet the needs of their students or, as Sister Sandra calls them, their customers.

“A good salesman taps into his customer and knows how to serve them. No one in this city knows that customer better than we do,” she told the Tennessee Register, newspaper of the Nashville Diocese.

Since 1994 Sister Sandra and her sister have been running a remedial school program for at-risk students in the area, teaching preschool students and offering after-school help to elementary school students.

As a charter school, Smithson-Craighead Academy is part of the Nashville metro area’s public school system, but it also will have a certain level of autonomy in teaching and curriculum planning. Busing and school lunches are provided by the public school system. Faculty and staff undergo the same background checks and receive the same benefits as area public school employees.

The school enrolls students from three of the lowest performing schools in the Nashville area and will receive approximately $7,600 per student per school year in public school funds.

According to Tennessee state charter school laws, Smithson-Craighead Academy will be able to admit students only from public schools identified as “failing”-- a policy that Sister Sandra finds limiting.

The academy’s administration team is directed by a religious sister and Catholic lay people, but because it is a public school no religious formation is allowed.

“We will meet their (students’) critical needs first,” Sister Sandra said. “We will teach as Jesus taught. He didn’t start out talking about heaven; first he fed the multitudes.”

Faculty members feel they can instill the students with a solid value system in a completely secular educational environment.

“Character building is really coming back into the curriculum nationwide,”said Janelle Glover, principal of Smithson-Craighead Academy.

Glover, a member of St. Ignatius of Antioch Parish in Nashville and a former teacher certification officer at Fisk University, said that “you can teach children to make the right choices and take responsibility for their actions without a religious twist.”

A school’s charter can be revoked if a school is found to be openly promoting religion, and Smithson-Craighead teachers are well aware of the risks of doing so. To them, it’s a nonissue.

The two most common problems with charter schools, Glover noted, are children not making significant academic gains and the mismanagement of funds.

“We have the best faculty and staff and business manager to ensure that doesn’t happen,”she said.