A Principal (and Former Union Insider) Reflects on 25 Years of NYC’s ‘Exhausting’ Charter Wars

Gauthier once worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, learning the ins and outs of organized labor, before later making the move to a traditional public school that would become one of the first in the city to convert to a charter. Today, she serves as the principal of one of New York’s few unionized charters: Renaissance Charter School, a pre-K-12 independent conversion school in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Through the decades, she’s seen it all.

Gauthier joined Renaissance as its director of operations shortly after the school’s founding in 1994, and helped to write the school’s initial charter application, which was issued in 2000. She now also serves on the board of the New York City Coalition of Community Charter Schools.

Gauthier sat down with The 74 a few weeks ago to reflect on the history of one of the city’s oldest charter schools and her unique perspective of the turbulent city-charter school relationship.

Gauthier: In 1992, our founding teachers were all working in public schools. They were a little disillusioned with what was going on, didn’t feel that teachers had enough voice in how schools were run, didn’t feel that kids were actually happy being in school. I think they felt that the learning was a bit limited and not as holistic as they would like, and at the same time the Annenberg Foundation put out an Annenberg Challenge grant to create new models for schools and the teachers decided to submit one. They met frequently after school on their own time to submit this application … They were awarded the school and they opened up in 1993, initially with grades 3-7. It soon expanded to K-12 and started a preschool last school year. It converted to charter status in May 2000, becoming one of the first few independent charter schools in the city. We were one of the first schools I think that also shared space (with Junior High School 204 in Long Island City), which always makes me laugh a little bit given the climate now about sharing space. (Mayor Bill de Blasio has fought very publicly with various charter school networks over occupying space in existing public schools.)

I got involved in the school about a year later, about 1994, when Monte Joffee, who was the school’s founding principal, was kind of going around Jackson Heights drumming up interested parents. And for me, I was an interested parent; I had a 3-year-old and I wanted to get a more progressive education for him. I was working then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as director of education services and interested in having a school that seemed to have a family-like atmosphere, somewhere where I could be really involved and Monte sold me on the model and the mission and the vision.

At the same time we were forming this group called Friends of the Renaissance School to get people interested and excited and also to get the school a permanent home because we knew we were going to quickly grow out of being in 204 and wanted to move it to Jackson Heights. (Eventually we took over a former department store in the neighborhood on 81st Street; we’ve leased the space from the Department of Education for more than 15 years now.)

Back in the mid-90s, myself and several others really became passionate about (growing the school), and not all of us had kids; some were passionate neighborhood activists. We did have some opposition too, initially, because there were people who were not interested in having a high school come into their neighborhood.

When kids sometimes come from more traditional schools, our building can be a bit of a shock. We’re a noisy place. We’re a place where we really want to see kids actively involved in things. Not all schools are like that. We’re also a place where you take arts from the very lowest grades, and students in our upper grades major in an art.

We like to think of ourselves as a village, so we know our kids really well. Many of our families send multiple kids here. … But now since we’ve been around so long, we actually have kids of our former students in the school, as well as a member of the first graduating class of 1999 who has returned as a teacher. So it is like a village, it’s a different way of thinking. We want our kids also to be independent learners and independent thinkers. Our kids call staff by their first names. So “Renaissance-izing” kind of means getting them to understand how you operate in an environment like that, which can be a little shocking for some kids … Especially if they’ve been somewhere that’s tighter — it’s like, ‘Whoa, all this freedom,’ and so how do you manage that freedom?

It was frustrating because several of us spent a lot of time meeting and really trying to talk about the charter movement in a different way. … I think that when de Blasio came in, he and the chancellor to some degree, painted all charter schools with a broad brush. And I think several of us came in (to City Hall) saying, ‘There’s many faces of this charter movement, and also several of your critiques of the charter movement may not be accurate.’ Renaissance, for example, does not “counsel out” poor-performing or unruly students and is committed to backfilling each open seat, no matter what grade level it is in.  You can audit our records and you’ll see that. … Part of the conversation that we had was, if you really want to weed out the bad apples, don’t just look at charters, look across the board.

We’re holding onto our purpose but I think the movement has changed and I think the problem that you have for schools like Renaissance and other smaller schools is it’s not necessarily a climate that’s encouraging these small innovative labs. It’s encouraging replications of what they say are successful models. And I don’t want to say it’s a bad thing … but I think it’s kind of sad that authorizers seem to be approving more of the networks and that (if) somebody has a really good, independent idea, they probably have a harder time (getting approved as a smaller school).

For Renaissance, we still have some friends in City Hall. The friends we have I think really do like us and have tried to help us when they can. But my overall assessment is that this administration really doesn’t care for charters. I think they’re trying to compensate for what they felt was an administration that was too charter-friendly and maybe abandoned the public school system to some degree and (tried) to give charters everything, in their mind.

It may not be possible for unions to represent members in both (district and charter) schools because there’s this big political war going on, which to me is silly and unnecessary, and it’s exhausting, and I’ve been around with this for 15 years, watching this battle. It’s “us against them,” it’s charters against the public schools and who can have what and “you’re stealing money.” There’s no money being stolen — the money follows the kids. We should have equitable funding in both schools.

This winter and spring I think you’ll see that being a big part of the Coalition of Community Charter Schools’ efforts in Albany.