At Visible Men Academy, it’s about solving more than just academic issues

It’s not uncommon for charter schools to target kids who aren’t thriving in traditional school settings.

Many of the successful charters find their student bodies by appealing to some type of niche, like offering extra emphasis on arts or science that traditional public schools can no longer offer. Charters boast small class sizes and tend to focus less on preparing kids for state exams. Some charters, including a few in Manatee County, focus on helping low-income students who are also behind grade-level.

For some charters, though, that can be a risky play. If charters fail to earn passing grades on the state’s accountability system, the local school district sponsoring the charter is forced to shut the school down. That’s what recently happened to the elementary charter school run by the Just for Girls nonprofit, although the district was able to work a solution to keep the program going.

And that’s what may happen to Visible Men Academy if things don’t get better in the 2016-17 school year. The charter school serves about 130 boys from kindergarten to fifth grade from both Manatee and Sarasota counties, mainly from low-income families. After earning an F from the state for both the 2014-15 year and the 2015-16 year, the school must improve its grade for this year.

Normally, two years of F grades in a row in a charter school triggers a shutdown. Since the state rolled out a new test, based on more rigorous standards, in the 2014-15 year, schools across the state were held harmless for that year.

But if Visible Men gets an F after this year, it will be forced to stop operating as a charter.

Neil Phillips, a founder of the school, said Visible Men Academy tries to balance what he views as the school’s core mission to “provide boys with outstanding academic, character and social education in a nurturing school environment” with the need to perform well on the state assessment to continue that mission.

“Internally, we refuse to refer to this as the school grade. It’s not,” he said. “It’s a reflection of the performance on the Florida Standards Assessments.”

A ‘national crisis’

Visible Men Academy first opened its doors for the 2013-14 year, after gaining approval by the Manatee County School Board. It was the first all-boys charter approved by the school board and the second single-sex charter, behind the Just for Girls elementary school.

Phillips said he wanted to start the school in response to what he viewed as “a national crisis.” That crisis was a failure on traditional school systems to educate low-income boys, primarily of color, and those students were then falling further and further behind grade-level expectations. Phillips wants to serve those boys well in school, in the local community and in society.

Recent issues in society — like the police shooting deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and the continued conversation over Black Lives Matter — only further highlight Phillips’ mission.

“It’s part of our reason for being,” he said. “These tragedies are so egregious and sad and the loss of life puts all of the attention on these very real challenges and takes away from some of the areas where the healthy relationships are.”

Children need to be taught that they have self-worth and they have value. If they are taught that and if they believe that, then they’ll behave accordingly. But children at a young age internalize what they see and what they hear in society. And if children of color are seeing and hearing that their lives don’t matter, they’ll end up acting that way.

Phillips’ school is about changing that direction. It’s about showing the children “visible men” in society who are making positive changes. At Visible Men, there’s a focus on bringing in community mentors to show the students what they, too, can achieve in their lives.

At VMA, boys are expected to learn how to SHINE, which stands for selflessness, honesty, integrity, niceness and excellence. The school is modeled on five different components, including the single-gender classrooms nature; an extended school day and year; a “success curriculum,” that emphasizes the SHINE characteristics; data-driven instruction; and staff and faculty support.

Housed out of a church at 921 63rd Ave. E., Bradenton, with a bunch of portables in the back, the school is targeting an enrollment of 130 students for the 2016-17 year. In the past couple years, officials have hoped to create a more permanent home, including an $85,000 purchase of the land next door, to try to get the students out of the portables and into a dedicated school space.

But future plans may be on hold, as leaders work through the 2016-17 school year to be what Phillips calls an “and” culture, improving student grades while maintaining the focus on character education as well.

“Being an ‘and’ culture means standardized testing is important, we’re going to try to do really well on that, and these other things are really important, too,” Phillips said.

Does single-sex education work?

VMA and Just for Girls aren’t anomalies in the state of Florida for serving low-income students in their charters. But they are a little more uncommon in that they serve students of just one sex.

Almost 50 percent of students enrolled in charters qualify for free- and reduced-lunch programs in the state, almost 10 percent of charter students are English Language Learners and almost 10 percent of charter students are categorized as having disabilities. In the 2015-16 year, more than 650 charters in the state of Florida were responsible for educating more than 269,000 students.

In Florida, few charters, according to the state’s directory, educate students in a single-sex environment. A search of “single-gender” on the state charter brings up 15 results. The directory still lists Just for Girls.

There’s no specific “type” of student that single-gender education works best for, said Kathy Piechura-Couture, a professor of education at Stetson University and research fellow at the Nina B. Hollis Institute of Educational Reform.

In the past 13 years of research, Piechura-Couture said if there has been a statistical difference when comparing single-gender classes to mixed-gender classes, it does tend to favor the single-gender classes.

She pointed to the single-gender Franklin Academy charter schools, in Brevard and Broward counties, as examples that tend to do well academically. Both boys and girls can attend those charters, but they are educated in single-gender classrooms.

When it comes to single-gender education, continuous professional development in the pedagogy of single-gender education is key, Piechura-Couture said. Schools that aren’t successful academically when it comes to single-gender education don’t do enough continuous professional development.

Sometimes, schools open and start strong and there may be a change in leadership or high turnover in teachers and then a lack of professional development for new teachers coming in, Piechura-Couture said.

“Every teacher needs continuous professional development to look at what is working and what isn’t working,” she said.

A year of changes at VMA

While Phillips said he wants the school to continue its character education on top of improving academics, changes are in store for VMA this year, in an effort to help boost grades.

“It’s a real challenge as a school leader,” he said. “When it’s an F grade, the tendency or the danger is to pour everything you have into trying to nudge up that grade at the expense of the these other things which we know are important in these boys’ lives.”

During the summer, VMA added a summer literacy program to help students behind grade level. Phillips is resuming the role of principal, which he had stepped away from to focus on expansion, for the 2016-17 year. He’s also bringing on an assistant principal, who he hopes will help foster academic programs that help show growth.

The charter school’s board also recently signed off on doubling the school’s budget for math and reading resources. Teachers are also going to get more professional development and training, after the charter board signed off on it.

Students who fall below grade level will get more remediation time this upcoming year.

A former focus on growing the enrollment numbers is going by the wayside for at least one year, Phillips said.

“We’re prioritizing the students we already have,” he said. “We’re making sure we’re serving the students.”

If VMA fails to increase the school grade in the 2016-17 year, it likely will follow in the footsteps of Just for Girls, although the state does have a process in place where charters under the automatic-termination clause can request one more year to make gains.

Since 2013-14, there have been four charter schools that requested a one-time, one-year waiver of termination. All were denied by the state board because none of the schools made sufficient learning gains, according to DOE.

This story was originally published August 13, 2016 at 10:00 AM with the headline "At Visible Men Academy, it’s about solving more than just academic issues."