Chris Schulz Published

Proposed Morgantown Charter School Holds Public Forum For Second Application

Two men stand in front of a grey desk in front of a grey wall with an image being projected on it. The man on the left wears a white and grey shirt over black pants as he leans on the large desk. The man on the right sports a white chinstrap beard without a moustache and wears a dark blue jacket over grey pants with a red and blue striped tie and a red white and blue gingham button down shirt while clasping his hands in front of him.
Wisdom Academy board members Abdul Rahman Tarabishy, left, and Javaid Syed speak to the public forum in Morgantown Oct. 10, 2024.
Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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The only organization currently pursuing approval for a charter school in the state held a public forum in Morgantown last week. 

Last year, the Wisdom Academy submitted an application to the Professional Charter School Board to become West Virginia’s latest charter school. However, the application was rejected.     

Javaid Syed is the board chair for Wisdom Academy. He said a lack of financing was the main reason for the rejection.

“What you want is you want commitments,” he said. “So this year, we have gotten commitments over $900,000 from our community. And we have submitted that as well. Plus, we have made major changes in our application as well.”

Now, the Wisdom Academy is applying again. Some of the changes Syed referred to include a rigorous assessment schedule for potential students, part of the proposed school’s “Individual Performance Plan for Success” (IPPS). Described in the application as a “portfolio like” database of student materials, board members like Debra Harrison said the IPPS will be used to assess students quarterly with teacher, administrative and parental input.

“If you put a process or a program in place, you need to monitor it to make sure it’s being effective,” Harrison said. “One of the things that often happens is these wonderful programs are put into place, and then the appropriate monitoring doesn’t occur, so that you can’t really determine the success of that program.”

A lifelong educator, Harrison joined the Wisdom Academy board between application cycles and helped develop the school’s new curriculum and assessment program.

“We will be continually monitoring the pieces that we put into place, and they will be monitored quarterly, and we can immediately intervene if we see that there’s a deficit, or we can also accelerate students,” she said. “If we find that there’s an area of interest that they’re excelling in, then we can provide them those opportunities as well.”

If approved, the school would open its doors in the fall of 2025 and become the second physical charter school in Morgantown and the fifth in the state. At a public forum this past Thursday, Syed and other board members laid out the case for the charter school. Their pitch amounts to taking advantage of a charter school’s curricular flexibility to address a cultural need in the Morgantown community.

“There’s a community here, a pretty large community, and they feel that the kind of needs that they have, the current schools are not meeting,” Syed said. “Plus the children are being sort of mishandled.”

Muslim students at Morgantown High School were recently granted a space to conduct group prayers on Friday after a year of discussion with school and county administration.

Both last year and again at this year’s public forum, attendants specifically asked about the school teaching Arabic as a foreign language. Syed said the school will be free to choose any language to teach that the community may like.

Abdo Buais is a Morgantown business owner. Despite not having children of his own, he attended the Oct. 10 forum, and said his friends need a different way of educating their kids that better fits their culture.

“For example my people, they came from Arabic countries,” Buais said. “In the future, they cannot speak Arabic, this is one of the problems. So they need some place that can, after school, they can also learn Arabic.” 

Buais, who is originally from Yemen, also said a growing Spanish-speaking community in Morgantown would benefit from the flexibility a charter school can offer. In his presentation, Syed highlighted extensive after school extracurriculars as part of the school’s plan for student development.

The Wisdom Academy is currently the only active charter school application in the state. At its recent board meeting, the Professional Charter School Board announced a new partnership with consultant Ampersand Education to produce marketing materials and campaigns to attract charter school applicants. 

James Paul is the executive director of the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board. He said he has worked with the Wisdom Academy board to improve portions of their application. 

“Our role as an authorizer is not to be a distant, far away body that just says yes or no,” Paul said. “I want to work with applicants and help them develop their application in a way that’s going to produce a school that’s most likely to succeed and most likely to fill needs in communities in West Virginia.”

Paul said people like Buais, along with a survey of local families presented as part of the application, are a good indicator that the school is wanted.

“Another indicator of demand for this school is the amount of individuals who have come out now two years in a row, to hear about the plans for Wisdom Academy in a public forum,” he said.  

Paul said the board will give a decision on the application by the end of November.