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| Megan Kirby | Shaimelle Harris |
By Hrishi Deshpande, 16, Y-Press
In the last few years, charter schools have become a viable alternative to private and public schools in Indiana. This year, 66 charters are in operation compared to 37 five years ago.
Shaimelle Harris, 15, turned to a charter school for high school. Though she attended Indianapolis Public Schools her entire life and was planning on attending the district’s near-Eastside high school, Arsenal Tech, she decided she really needed a new environment.
“If I want to Tech, there would be like 30 or plus of us in the classroom, being distracted and we wouldn’t learn,” she said. “The kids there are ridiculous. They’re smart-mouthed. They don’t follow (instruction). They basically act like they don’t want to be there.”
So last year, when she was a freshman, she enrolled at Herron High School, a public charter school Downtown that has been open to students since 2006.
Megan Kirby, 18, also was attracted to the small class sizes and individualized attention at Herron. She had attended a private school in seventh and eighth grades and wanted to continue with an intimate school environment.
“As far as I know, charter schools are generally smaller ’cause they can put a limit on people, whereas public schools can’t. So that affects everything,” she said.
Herron champions a classical, liberal arts education for students in grades 9-12. The charter school's college-prep curriculum is structured around an “art history timeline,” and the school is highly ranked in several nationwide polls.
Both girls were attracted to the school’s high academic standards, though Shaimelle said she had to overcome some bad habits to make the grade.
“I had a rude awakening,” she said. “I used to be a straight-A student, but then when I got older in IPS schools, I learned like, ‘Oh yeah, we can blow off our work.’ We blow off our work because we already knew that we would get automatically skipped up to the next grade, regardless.”
Such was not the case at Herron. Shaimelle learned that rather than getting by with Cs or Ds, she had to go through remediation and to summer school. But she’s back on track. “I would say I’m a straight B/C student. I’m working on getting my A’s back.”
Megan’s difficulty was not with keeping up but with transportation. She lives on the far Southeastside of Indianapolis, not far from Franklin Central High School, a public township school, and by the end of her freshman year, she decided to go to that school instead of commuting to Herron.
Though she adjusted to the change, she still preferred the smaller campus of Herron. Fortunately, she was able to return to Herron her senior year, in part because she was able to drive herself there.
She is happy with many of Herron’s qualities, but particularly with the arts-centered curriculum, which she feared would be sacrificed at Franklin Central because of budget cuts.
“A lot of the academics that I think matter, like art and music, they were cutting those,” she said. “I think they are really important, probably almost as important as like math and English in some aspects, and Herron focuses on that.”
Megan sympathizes with public schools and students in the face of such cutbacks.
“At Franklin Central, it’s really big and they cut almost a hundred teachers recently, and so the class sizes are going to be even bigger, like 40 to 50 kids per classroom, and I think that’s just awful. It’s not possible to teach in that environment,” she said.
Shaimelle also sympathizes with public-school administrators but says they need to focus on discipline before experimenting with other reforms, such as a year-round calendars and uniforms. She says fighting and conflict were the rule, not the exception, at her middle school.
“As soon as you walked in the door, all you would hear is kids cussing out their teachers and fighting,” she said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Even though her old school has a discipline policy regarding fighting and swearing, she said those rules were rarely enforced. “What [administrators] don’t seem to understand is the reason why the schools are like that is because they allow the students to act the way they do,” she said.
Herron has a zero-tolerance policy for fighting, which means students engaged in aggressive or violent behavior will be suspended immediately. And while Shaimelle appreciates the academic rigor of her new school, she really prizes its calm.
“We don’t have any police. They are not even around the premises, at all,” she said. “Our school is like a family. We all know each other, and we all have support for each other.”
Assistant editor Kuren Sikand, 17, and reporters Justin Herring, 12, and Darius Jordan, 15, contributed to this story.
