Adapted from the

Executive Summary

of the South Carolina charter school application of Jubilee Charter School

The lovely Lowcountry of South Carolina has long experienced disappointing outcomes in public education. When it comes to schooling, the hopes of local families, business builders, and community leaders have repeatedly been dashed.

Now a regional voluntary group has designed a special school—and rich ecosystem of social supports surrounding it—that will be capable of overcoming this unfortunate history. We are focusing deep local, state, and national expertise plus millions of philanthropic dollars on this project to make sure area children can bloom to their full potential. Residents of the Lowcountry know that our region is bursting to become a Corridor of Success and Opportunity. An exemplary charter school built on high expectations for all of our youngsters will be at the heart of that.

The team building the Jubilee Charter School has decades of experience in high-achieving public education. And we have started with several crucial commitments that take the guesswork and uncertainty out of creating a top-performing school.

Foremost, we are not standing up some unproven, theoretical model and then hoping for the best. We are bringing in a time-tested operating partner. Our first act was to research the schools in South Carolina that are already producing strong results among needy children. The one that impressed us most was the Meeting Street network in Charleston and Spartanburg. When it comes to accelerating at-risk students to academic success, the schools they currently run are among the best in America. The public school they operate in Spartanburg ranks in the top 5 percent statewide for math and reading proficiency, even as its student body is 100 percent low-income, minority, and under-resourced. The Jubilee Charter School will be a careful, high-quality, close adaptation of the Meeting Street Spartanburg model—bringing to Jasper County a school-management structure that is proven, not just aspirational.

Another crucial insight of our experienced founders is that any school which intends to dramatically improve the generational prospects of needy pupils must start young, and offer an unbroken chain of top-shelf educational offerings right from the earliest years up through high-school graduation. To guarantee the quality and consistency of our offerings, the Jubilee Charter School will follow a very controlled growth pattern. We will open in the Fall of 2023 with just PK4 and kindergarten students, then add one higher grade every year until we have a superb PK to 12th Grade institution serving around 700 children. This gradual approach will allow us to find and hire only first-rate teachers. It’ll let us carefully refine our curriculum and practices to fully mesh with the needs of our pupils. It will give us time to intensively cultivate strong learning habits in our students and high expectations among local families.

In addition to starting our charter with the youngest children and forging a continuous educational chain that will carry our alumni from each level all the way through high-school graduation, we are going even deeper with a philanthropic sister institution. Families who desire will have the opportunity to enroll their two- and three-year-old children in the Jubilee Preschool that will be sited next to the Jubilee Charter School. A nonprofit powered by donor grants, the preschool will provide local parents with one more accessible and high-quality opportunity to get their youngsters prepared to succeed in school. In a part of South Carolina currently known as a “childcare desert,” this inventive 200-seat preschool will be a thrilling new option for families.

A fourth innovation that will dramatically boost the effectiveness of the Jubilee Charter School is the panoply of support services now being launched across the school’s catchment area by the Jubilee Community Partnership. Our umbrella 501c3 is creating medical clinics, prenatal care, deep mentoring programs, child-safety initiatives, home visitation supports, job services for parents, and adult language-learning, GED, and other services that will boost family health and prosperity on multiple levels. That will have many positive overflow effects on schooling success.

A fifth insight of our design team is recognition that many charter schools (who get no separate public funding for their facilities) end up weighed down by building costs that can eat a fifth or more of a typical school’s total revenue flow, year after year. This diversion of their state reimbursements into bricks and mortar makes it hard for these schools to afford superb teaching. With that in mind, the Jubilee Community Partnership is relieving the Jubilee Charter School of facility costs. The Partnership’s donors are in the process of buying a prime piece of land, which will soon be developed into a highly functional elementary-school building, to be followed by a middle and high school. These facilities will be made available to the Jubilee Charter School at no net cost, freeing the school leaders to concentrate all of their public funding and entrepreneurial energy on creating great instruction for students, instead of managing real estate.

A sixth unusual advantage of the Jubilee Charter School will be the Jubilee Journey bus service. School buses are yet another amenity for which there is no public funding available to charter schools. The backers of the Jubilee Charter School are filling this gap by planning a freestanding bus network that will help children travel to school (and also help parents commute to jobs, the majority of which are located outside of our immediate region, causing many economic and family dislocations).

The Jubilee Charter School has thus created a practical, multi-layered, hard-headed, soft-hearted, deeply resourced, time-proven plan that will actually bring into being something residents of rural South Carolina have long pined for but never had available: A school that reliably elevates all children—especially those with fewest advantages—to academic proficiency and a life of productive independence and dignified good citizenship. Rural parents will have choices never before available to them.

Our charter school will start at earlier ages, put in more hours, offer broader services, procure and train better teachers, set high expectations, apply heavy investments, mix character training with demanding academics, respect multiple forms of intelligence, make compacts with parents to meet us half way, and build a loving and supportive community centered on the fulfillment of promises and responsibilities. In the process we will create a charter school capable of bending the generational curve for thousands of families. It will transform Jasper and western Beaufort counties. And it will serve as a lighthouse for scores of other underserved rural areas across South Carolina and the nation that are hungry for educational excellence, healthier childhoods, and thriving community life.