Partnership answers academic problems

  On a brisk January day at a Briargate Panera Bread, two of the Pikes Peak region's top educators talked over cups of coffee and scribbled on a yellow napkin.

   It was the first time they had met, but introductions quickly gave way to big ideas. Tony Kinkel, president of Pikes Peak Community College, and Mark Hyatt, president of The Classical Academy, the state's largest charter school, conceived plans for a new kind of partnership and, in a lightbulb moment, scrawled them on the nearest paper they could find.

   Today, seven months later, the napkin is trash. But the agreement is near completion and, with others in academia watching, it might reshape how Colorado educators think about high school and college.

   Under the agreement, TCA will build a school on PPCC land at its Rampart Range campus, near New Life Church on Colorado Highway 83. The two schools will share classroom space and even students at the northern Colorado Springs campus.

   Financially, the partnership provides the two schools a way to ease their crowding at a lower cost to taxpayers. TCA will borrow $13 million, using the state funding it receives for students, to build the 81,000-square-foot facility. PPCC will provide the land for $1 a year, and it will lease 10 classrooms at $122,000 a year, $80,000 less than it would cost to rent comparable commercial property and a small fraction of the cost to build its own.

   But the partnership is more than buildings. It blurs the line between high school and college classrooms. TCA students will have a chance to enroll in high school classes that provide them with college credits.

   Already, PPCC has reached agreements with two other charter schools, Colorado Springs Early Colleges and 21st Century Charter, to use its curricula and certify teachers as adjunct college faculty, which allows their students to earn college and high school credit for a single course. Now PPCC is looking into ways to help home-school families find state money for tuition so they, too, can get in on dualcredit courses.

   The practice of offering dual-credit courses is common in traditional high schools, but these attempts to bring the same benefits to charter schools and homeschool families are a way, according to PPCC, to reach an untapped market of new students.

Putting politics aside

   Kinkel, who at 23 became Minnesota's youngest state lawmaker and served 12 years in the House and four in the Senate before entering academia, is familiar with the political divide over charter schools. Critics accuse charter schools of diverting state dollars - and students - from traditional classrooms at a time when funding is scarce. Supporters herald them as a choice for parents dissatisfied with the traditional public school system.

   Kinkel sees PPCC as common ground. He tells charter school critics that the community college brings students back into the fold, since PPCC is a traditional public institution. His message to charter schools and supporters is that college offerings can make them more competitive and help students.

   "My argument to the conservatives and the liberals is we're the one entity everybody can agree upon," he said about PPCC.

   Simply put, PPCC wants students. Each student comes with state funding, and in Colorado a community college's financial health depends almost entirely on enrollment.

   PPCC recently struck an agreement with Falcon School District 49 to put a fourth campus in Falcon. The college is spending $600,000 to remodel part of the former Falcon Middle School, and it is sharing the building with D-49's alternative school.

   Yet charter schools and home schools, Kinkel said, make up a significant part of the region's students and are largely unnoticed. El Paso County has the most charter schools of any county in the state, TCA's Hyatt said.

   Many parents who choose charter schools or home schooling are preparing their children to go to big-name universities, Kinkel and Hyatt said. But that doesn't mean PPCC can't help them get there, they say. Whether it is a few courses while students are in high school or core classes after graduation at cheaper tuition, students are students.

   For those students who go on to major schools and big careers, Kinkel said he thinks there may be a long-term return on the investment someday: political power.

   TCA students often go off to schools such as the service academies, Ivy League universities or other nationally prominent colleges, and some end up rising into politically important positions. When it is time for Colorado to discuss funding community colleges, that former student might become a political friend of PPCC, the thinking goes.

   Colorado is 50th in the nation in state funding of community colleges.

   "I'm a smart enough politician," Kinkel said, "to know that we need that constituency to support what we're trying to do here."

Something to offer

On a recent Saturday, Kinkel visited with home-school parents at a breakfast organized through their email network. By the time a home-schooled child reaches high school, he told them, parents often need help teaching complex subjects, say calculus or chemistry. Why not enroll the student at PPCC and get both high school and college credit?

   The college enrolls about 450 home-schooled students.

   If there's a way to help families cover their tuition for dual-credit offerings, as high schools are able to do for students, he thinks that number would triple. It is unclear whether a program like that can be developed under existing statute or would require new legislation, he said, but added: "I think we're pretty close to figuring it out."

   Hyatt said he's investigating that possibility through TCA's home-school program, a program with a structured curriculum and standards tailored for families withhome-schooled children.

Other educators are watching PPCC's partnerships with interest. Kinkel recently got a call from a think tank in Denver and a developer looking into starting a charter school, he said. Hyatt said Pueblo Community College and other charter school leaders are watching to see how his agreement with PPCC works out.

   "I think it's the wave of the future," Hyatt said.

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Staff writer Shari Chaney Griffin contributed to this report.