The York Academy Regional Charter School (YARCS), a three-district regional charter school which offers an International Baccalaureate curriculum, is a new school venture unique in Pennsylvania.

Board of Trustees

Mission

The York Academy Regional Charter School will provide students with a challenging learning environment which opens doors for growth, opportunity and academic excellence.

Through a world-class International Baccalaureate curriculum, this school will set students up to succeed by teaching them the tools and the content knowledge necessary to participate as full citizens in our increasingly global culture. The school will ensure that the learning is engaging, relevant, challenging and significant. A trans-disciplinary model will promote interesting, comprehensive learning, stressing themes of global importance that transcend the confines of traditional subject areas. These themes promote an awareness of the human condition and an understanding that there is a commonality of human experience. This sharing of experience will increase the students' awareness of and sensitivity to the experiences of others beyond the local or national community. The development of an international perspective is an element critical to the vision of this Charter School.

History

The York Academy Regional Charter School project grew out of YorkCounts, a community-wide initiative which began in York County in 1996 when David Rusk, a leading urban expert, conducted a study of the community with the particular goal of improving York City, the urban heart of the county. The Rusk Report ultimately yielded four education and four municipal recommendations: York Academy is a direct outgrowth of one of Rusk's education recommendations. (See yorkcounts.org) After 2 ½ years of study involving 25 - 30 community volunteers, including the school superintendents from the City of York and the four first-ring suburbs, the organizing committee presented the charter application to three York County school districts on November 13, 2009: The School District of the City of York, the York Suburban School District and The Central York School District. By the end of February of 2010, each of these three districts had approved the charter application, two of them unanimously.

The York Academy venture is unique on two counts: (1) we have established the only three-district charter school in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and (2) we have established the only charter school in the Commonwealth which has combined students from three different school districts with dramatically different racial and socio-economic profiles. Education experts tell us that any school district with a poverty level exceeding 40% will experience difficulty reaching acceptable academic performance levels. Because of the 85% poverty level in the City school district and the inevitable social problems which go along with a high-poverty population, young middle-class families elect not to establish residency in the city. These educated families will not keep their children in a school system which consistently fails to meet state and federal standards. The absence of a middle-class population has widespread effects, not just on the school district but also on the general civic life of York. A committed business community continues to roll out well-conceived redevelopment efforts, but these efforts will not transform city living in the longer term if some alternatives to the city schools cannot be developed in order to keep young middle-class families in the city.

Our charge from YorkCounts was to develop some kind of alternate education programming which could serve to keep young middle-class families in the city and also provide a first-rate education to students whose families lack the financial means to move out of the city. The concentration of poverty and its attendance problems is a fact with which we grappled in the most effective ways available to us. We were not empowered to circumvent the existing City school board and administration in order to provide new educational opportunities or a better-quality education for all of the students in the York City School District: only the City school board and administrators have the power to enact innovative programming on that scale. We did have the ability to develop new programming which could enrich a large number of city students and honor one of David Rusk's recommendations by establishing a charter school combining city and county students.

Uncertainty and concern characterize the attitude of much of the suburban population towards what they see as an underachieving city school system. We knew that our York Academy proposal had to be bold and strong and innovative in order to entice suburban families into sending their children into the city for school. Because there are fewer than 15 K-12 International Baccalaureate schools in the United States, we decided to establish a three-district, K-12 regional charter school featuring an International Baccalaureate curriculum. We are confident that programming of that rigor and prestige will be the enticement which will prompt suburban parents to send their children into the City of York daily for school.

The York Academy opened on August 22, 2011 in the historic, pre-Civil War Smyser-Royer building located at 32 W. North Street in the City of York with students in kindergarten, first, and second grades and will continue to add one grade each year until it reaches full implementation as a K-12 school. Our pre-enrollment statistics indicate that uncertainty and concern can be overcome when the opportunity arises to enroll in a school with first-rate leadership and programming: half of our pre-enrolled students are from the City School District and the other half divide fairly evenly between the two suburban districts. By combining three disparate local school districts, we will be able to establish the kind of natural racial and socio-economic balance which existed in the City school district before the riots and white flight changed the character of York and its school district.