2022 WRCCS Conference
July 26-27, 2022
Register here: https://2022wrccs.sched.com/tickets
This annual conference offers participants the opportunity to build professional connections and to learn alongside our highly experienced charter school coaches. This is an amazing opportunity to celebrate and share best practices with dedicated educators from around the state and even around the country. We look forward to learning with you!
Tuesday, July 26th will be all about charter school authorizing and governance boards, and Wednesday, July 27th will be all about charter school leadership and classrooms. All are welcome to attend both days, but know that the content will be highly focused to maximize our time together.
Conference sessions are based on the WRCCS Charter School Competencies and are designed to be hands-on and interactive; participants are encouraged to ask questions, share ideas, and build solutions together.
If you are a DPI charter school sub-grantee, please review your requirements regarding conference participation to ensure your team fulfills the proper attendance requirements.
There is no fee for attendees for the WRCCS Conference, as we are supported fully by the federal charter schools program grant. Whether your school is just starting out or has been going strong, your whole team will walk away with resources and action items to support your great work. Please pass on this learning opportunity to anyone you feel would be interested.
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Here is a list of offered session between the two conference days. Additional details with times will be coming soon! Start thinking about what sessions you and your team would like to attend!
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- The Journey of Collaboration and Coexistence: Come join leaders in Solon Springs as they discuss their journey of designing three charter schools that collaborate with the legacy schools in the district to ensure a culture of trust and respect. Join the conversation about the power a district can have when the culture is right.
- Charter School Funding: Come learning from the Associate Director of the DPI Parental Education Options team all about how charter school funding works. This session will cover Independent Charter Schools funding for 2x and 2r schools and also how school district funding is calculated and passed to charter schools.
- Group Think / Group Connect: Meet with other authorizers from around the state of Wisconsin and share successes and solutions for challenges. This session will consist of small group breakout rooms where participants will be given the opportunity to connect and share with others.
- Panel: Charter Flexibility: This session will kick off with the following questions but then hope the audience will also jump in with their own: 1. What is the biggest piece of flexibility you have gained by being a charter school? 2. What has been a challenge with some of the added flexibility of being a charter school? 3. What extra accountability has come with your charter flexibility?
- Ongoing and Meaningful Monitoring and Evaluation: Authorizers are responsible for ongoing monitoring of all charter schools in their portfolios. Monitoring should happen annually, comply with state statutes 118.40, generate an annual report, and adhere to NACSA principles and standards. Let's learn together how authorizers can create a reciprocal and transparent accountability system through creating shared expectations of a successful charter school. You will gain new insights, strategies, and templates for your ongoing monitoring practices.
- Renewing Your Charter Contract: Whether you're developing your first charter contract or you are planning on renewing your contract, this session is designed to help participants better understand the requirements and recommendations for the charter contract. Alex Roberson from the DPI charter school team will tae you through the benchmarks document and highlight key areas that are often confusing during the chartering process. Bring your specific questions and ask the experts!
- Portfolio/Application: The authorizer's portfolio of charter schools should communicate the authorizer's core purpose and public responsibilities. Come learn and discuss how a quality authorizer implements a portfolio with a comprehensive application process that includes clear application questions and guidance; follows fair, transparent procedures, and rigorous criteria; and grants charters only to applicants who demonstrate a strong capacity to establish and operate a quality charter school.
- DPI Charter Subgrantee Mandatory Reporting for Cohort 5: This session is required for all Cohort 5 (awarded in June 2022) Wisconsin Charter Schools Program Subgrantee schools. You much send at least one governance board member (president, preferably), and one authorizer representative. This session is for Cohort 5 only.
- Using Board Evaluation and Committee Engagement to Improve Governance Board Performance: Come learn from an experienced Governance Board President from Fond du Lac STEM as you will be walked through their continuous improvement process. The Fond du Lac STEM board used the WRCCS Diagnostic tool to identify the specific needs of the board. The results from the diagnostic tool informed the strategic goals of the board and the work of committees moving forward. Come learn and ask questions to bring a similar process back to your board.
- Financial Oversight for District Authorizer Charter Schools: This session will be a dialogue about the responsibility of financial oversight for District-Authorized Charter School boards. It is critical that governance boards understand, provide support where needed, and govern school finances. Come join the conversation and learn strategies for governing your charter schools finances. You will leave with a step-by-step guide to bring back to your own boards.
- The Journey of Collaboration and Coexistence: Come join leaders in Solon Springs as they discuss their journey of designing three charter schools that collaborate with the legacy schools in the district to ensure a culture of trust and respect. Join the conversation about the power a district can have when the culture is right.
- WRCCS Micro-credential: School Governance: Come hear Chain Exploration defend their WRCCS Governance Board Micro-credential. They will do a quick defense while peer reviewers evaluate their presentation. As audience participants, you will learn about successful practices and politics at the school and gain access to their artifacts. Additionally, you can see what is required for the micro-credential and start your process for a micro-credential for your school.
- Charter School Funding: Come learning from the Associate Director of the DPI Parental Education Options team all about how charter school funding works. This session will cover Independent Charter Schools funding for 2x and 2r schools and also how school district funding is calculated and passed to charter schools.
- Group Think / Group Connect: Meet with other governance board members from around the state of Wisconsin and share successes and solutions for challenges. This session will consist of small group breakout rooms where participants will be given the opportunity to connect and share with others.
- Governance Board Recruitment: One of the key responsibilities of a governance board member is to ensure that the board is sustainable. It is essential that your governance board implements a strategy to recruited and retain the right people to govern your charter school. Come discuss and learn about creating a governance board recruitment plan complete with a board member matrix, on-boarding process, recruitment, strategies, and board self-assessment.
- Panel: Charter Flexibility: This session will kick off with the following questions but then hope the audience will also jump in with their own: 1. What is the biggest piece of flexibility you have gained by being a charter school? 2. What has been a challenge with some of the added flexibility of being a charter school? 3. What extra accountability has come with your charter flexibility?
- Open, Open, Closed: This session is geared for governance boards wanting to better understand their legal responsibilities. Questions and concerns around Open Meeting Law, Open Records, and Closed Meetings consistently come to WRCCS from the field. Come learn from the Wisconsin Association of School Board (WASB) as they cover each of these in detail. Come as an experiences board member with questions or as a new board member still taking it all in.
- Renewing Your Charter Contract: Whether you're developing your first charter contract or you are planning on renewing your contract, this session is designed to help participants better understand the requirements and recommendations for the charter contract. Alex Roberson from the DPI charter school team will tae you through the benchmarks document and highlight key areas that are often confusing during the chartering process. Bring your specific questions and ask the experts!
- Consensus Governance: Learn from a longtime charter school leader, board member, and consultant all about how your governance board can operate using consensus rather than traditional Roberts' Rules governance.
- Essential Policies for Every Charter School: This session is designed for governance boards who are looking at developing and/or reviewing their policies. Boardman and Clark will highlight in this session essential policies that should govern every charter school, developed in conjunction with WRCCS and WASB. Come learn and ask questions with one of the leading legal teams representing charter schools in Wisconsin.
- Implementing Your Innovative School Design: An idea of model of innovation will only go so far without a clear and transparent strategy to ensure your innovation is implemented. Come learn rom the WRCCS team how to build a school playbook that becomes your daily school operation. Through the creation of practice profiles and outcome measurements, you will not only infuse clarity for your teachers and learners, but you will set your school up for success in an uncertain future.
- DPI Charter Subgrantee Mandatory Reporting for Cohort 5: This session is required for all Cohort 5 (awarded in June 2022) Wisconsin Charter Schools Program Subgrantee schools. You much send at least one governance board member (president, preferably), and one authorizer representative. This session is for Cohort 5 only.
- Mapping Out the Work of Charter School Design: Thinking about opening a school? Are you in the beginning stages of developing and designing a school? Come to this session to learn about recommended practices for charter school design. You'll be provided a handful of resources to assist you in your design phase.
- Wisconsin Charter School Program Grant Writing Preparation: This session is led by the Department of Public Instruction Charter School team designed to support schools thinking about applying for a charter school grant in the future. This presentation will allow participants to ask questions and learn through examples from their field to gain insights and techniques to better tell the story of their school.
- Implementing Your Innovative School Design: An idea of model of innovation will only go so far without a clear and transparent strategy to ensure your innovation is implemented. Come learn rom the WRCCS team how to build a school playbook that becomes your daily school operation. Through the creation of practice profiles and outcome measurements, you will not only infuse clarity for your teachers and learners, but you will set your school up for success in an uncertain future.
- Implementing or Rapidly Improving Your School Design: Building continuity and shared commitment is key to ensuring your innovation has the structure needed to be successful. This session will take participants through the process of deigning a school playbook complete with specific practices profiles that define each unique charter school design element.
- A Roadmap for Wisconsin Independent Charter Schools Serving Students with Disabilities: Charter schools are required to serve ALL students including students with IEPs. It is essential to establish and maintain a specific special education system to ensure students with IEPs have access to the general education curriculum. Come learn more about the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) as leaders from CESA 1 provide a walk-through of the Special Education Toolkit designed to support independently authorized charter schools as they develop and implement programs to address the needs of students with IEPs.
- Designing Your School Playbook: This session is designed for leaders and school designers who are looking to build school structures around their innovative model. Have you ever struggled onboarding a new teacher into your school model or explaining how your school pillars are implemented into your everyday operations? Come learn about how you can use a design profile to build commitment, clarity, and transparency around your unique school model.
- Unlearning and Relearning in Charter Schools: The unlearning process is one of reflection, destruction, and change, but it is also one of learning and growth. As leaders and teacher in charter schools, we are living a state of "unlearning" the legacy system we experienced as students and "relearning" a different approach to school. Join this session to dive deeper into understanding ways to "unlearn" and "relearn" the creative foundations of charter schools.
- Leading the Human System: Leadership is not based on title, it is based on the trust you hae earned from those you lead. In order to fulfill your unique purpose of a leader, we must first get our own mind right and build the actionable strategies needed to show up so others can reach their full human potential. This presentation is a guided conversation about the core principles of Humanistic Leadership: 1. Self-reflection and inner work, 2. Relentless pursuit to build trust, 3. Listen first, 4. Accept responsibility and believe in daily growth, and 5. Have a strategy, system, or plan that will be shared and discussed.
- Implementing or Rapidly Improving Your School Design: Building continuity and shared commitment is key to ensuring your innovation has the structure needed to be successful. This session will take participants through the process of deigning a school playbook complete with specific practices profiles that define each unique charter school design element.
- A Roadmap for Wisconsin Independent Charter Schools Serving Students with Disabilities: Charter schools are required to serve ALL students including students with IEPs. It is essential to establish and maintain a specific special education system to ensure students with IEPs have access to the general education curriculum. Come learn more about the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) as leaders from CESA 1 provide a walk-through of the Special Education Toolkit designed to support independently authorized charter schools as they develop and implement programs to address the needs of students with IEPs.
- Group Think / Group Connect: Meet with other charter school leaders from around the state of Wisconsin and share successes and solutions for challenges. This session will consist of small group breakout rooms where participants will be given the opportunity to connect and share with others.
- WDLC, WEN, WVS Partnerships and Staffing Solutions: Have you wanted to offer a class at your school but you don't have the staffing to do so? Have you struggled to find a teacher with the right license to teach a class? Come learn about state virtual resources and options designed to support schools.
- Designing Your School Playbook: This session is designed for leaders and school designers who are looking to build school structures around their innovative model. Have you ever struggled onboarding a new teacher into your school model or explaining how your school pillars are implemented into your everyday operations? Come learn about how you can use a design profile to build commitment, clarity, and transparency around your unique school model.
- Restorative Justice Practices in Schools: Are you committed to providing a safer and more welcoming place for your students? Join this session to learn about what is restorative justice, how one school implemented restorative practices, and discuss ways of weaving restorative justice practices and policies at your school.
- DPI Charter Subgrantee Mandatory Reporting for Cohort 5: This session is required for all Cohort 5 (awarded in June 2022) Wisconsin Charter Schools Program Subgrantee schools. For those schools either implementing or expanding in 2022-2023, you must send at least one school representative. This session is for Cohort 5 only.
- Panel: Can Learning Really Happen Outdoors and With Community Partners? Each of the charter schools participating in this panel have successfully implemented a school where a significant amount of learning happens outside the school walls and often with community partners. Join this panel and ask your questions and learn more about how you can use the outdoors as your classroom. Questions: 1. How would you describe your learning environment? 2. What are the benefits to learning outside and working with community partners? 3. What have the challenges been working outside the classroom? 4. What would be a recommended first step for others thinking about getting their learners out of the school building?
- Elementary Math Progressions for Personalized Learning: Teachers in the elementary classrooms (grades 1-5) describe Math Progressions for Personalized Learning. In the classroom, students have a visual for their progress on mastering the state standards. Simultaneously working through whole group lessons and individual practice on various platforms, students continue to show proficiency on SPPs, assessments created to determine proficiency on each state standard. The cycle of practice-assess-practice is ongoing within each standard, and students use the powerful process of goal setting to take control of their own learning.
- WRCCS Micro-credential - School Culture: Come listen and watch a live defense of a WRCCS School Culture Micro-credential. This is a very unique way to learn at a conference. Participants will listen in on this fishbowl session in whcih SOTA II charter school presents and shares evidence of their work around school culture while peer reviewers build clarity by asking questions.
- Trauma Sensitive Schools... Going Beyond Awareness: Because of the potentially long-lasting negative impact of trauma on physical and mental health, it is more important than ever that we have a plan to support learners and staff around areas of trauma. This session goes beyond awareness. Learn specific strategies and skills to better support anyone who has experienced trauma. Session will include introduction to Trauma-Sensitive Schools, Zones of Regulation, and Verbal Escalation Cycle. Learn how to take your teams through online modules to setting up foundational sustainable systems for trauma-sensitive support. Learn how to layer this work into your other systems.
- Building Opportunities for Students to Earn College Credit: This session is a discussion about how Northeast Wisconsin School of Innovation partners with NWTC to duel credit. Students gain knowledge, hands-on experience, and both college and high school credit. We will be answering the following questions: 1. What are the essential elements to building a strong partnership with a technical college? 2. How can students take classes on a college campus and earn high school credits? 3. What wrap-around services can be created to support high school students with a diverse set of needs who are attending college? 4. What solutions are needed to the challenged of students being on a college campus? Participants are encouraged to bring their own questions to make this session more relevant.
- Keeping the Student at the Center: It is important that the child is at the center of all of our educational decisions. Come learn how Isthmus Montessori Academy resists the urge to add any initiatives to meet students' needs. They engage the student to design and adapt the current learning environment to better serve the student.
- Group Think / Group Connect: Meet with other charter school teachers and staff from around the state of Wisconsin and share successes and solutions for challenges. This session will consist of small group breakout rooms where participants will be given the opportunity to connect and share with others.
- Strength-Based Education: Let's learn together how focusing on what students do well rather than what they cannot lead to higher engagement and deeper learning. Strengths-Based Education is grounded in positive psychology research as teachers work with students to provide opportunities to ise their talents to drive learning. Choice over the medium that aligns with the students and more input on curricular content, students are seeing purpose in education for the first time. This session will highlight some of our daily strategies that allow students to use their strengths as a guide for learning.
- Immersion Weeks (Cross Curricular Multi-Age Learning): In this session, N-Gage Academy will describe "Adulting" Immersion Week and "Drama" Immersion Week. Immersion weeks are opportunities for project-based schools to dive deep into target areas, retaining student choice while focusing on learning in a specific area. In Adulting Week, students practice financial skills and decisions, politics, and adults living in an imaginary town. Drama immersion week was created based on N-Gage student interests, emphasizes the arts, and brings in theater, music, and dance experts to work with students. Participants in this session will also have time to create immersion week ideas for their schools.
- The Journey Into Public Waldorf Education in an Outdoor School Setting: This session will be about the Journey of Tomorrow River Community Charter School. TRCCS works to Develop the whole child through movement, art, and nature guided by the Core Principles of Public Waldorf education. We will discuss the seven principles of Public Waldorf Education. We will also highlight the challenges of being a rural instrumentality charter school located at an environmental station with a desire to become fully accredited as a public Waldorf school. We are excited to share key takeaways of out journey that you can implement in your own schools.
- Restorative Justice Practices in Schools: Are you committed to providing a safer and more welcoming place for your students? Join this session to learn about what is restorative justice, how one school implemented restorative practices, and discuss ways of weaving restorative justice practices and policies at your school.
- Integrating Community Partnerships to Achieve Your Mission: Building strong community partnerships is at the root of what makes Milwaukee Academy of Sciences unique in the world of education. Come list as they share specific strategies that have been leveraged to ensure the community is a critical piece of a student's experience.
- Developing Strong Positive Relationships Among Teachers, Students, and Families in a Virtual Environment: How can we build virtual learning environments based on strong positive relationships among teachers, students, and families? Come and join leaders at eSucceed Virtual School as they share their learning and research around this critical question. Building relationships in a virtual setting has been proven to be one of the most instrumental things that a teacher can do to help a student succeed. By building these relationships among teachers, students, and families there has been an increase in student engagement, better support for student mental health, and an increase in academic growth. Through Samantha Klump's dedicated research on this topic, she will share different ways to build positive teacher-student relationships as well as teacher-parent relationships in a virtual environment.
- Panel: How Do You Transition Your Graduates? Each of the charter schools participating in this panel has successfully implemented a school with a specifically designed plan for transition after graduation. These school each pride themselves on designing learning environments that promote a smooth transition into career or college. Join this panel and ask your questions and learn more about how you can design your school to better serve your students after they leave.
- DPI Charter Subgrantee Mandatory Reporting for Cohort 5: This session is required for all Cohort 5 (awarded in June 2022) Wisconsin Charter Schools Program Subgrantee schools. For those schools either implementing or expanding in 2022-2023, you must send at least one school representative. This session is for Cohort 5 only.
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