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North Carolina Charter School Enrollment Soars in 2021

If you are a charter school bond investor having nightmares that COVID would take a toll on charter school enrollment, you are in for a good night’s sleep. In a review of enrollment trends, the School Improvement Partnership (SIP) Database confirms an enrollment increase of over 10% from 2018 through 2020 at all North Carolina charter schools.  A...

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Charter Schools at Age 30: Can Facilities Keep Up?

When former Minnesota State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge traveled the tumultuous journey to pass the first charter school law in the nation on June 4, 1991, the issue of charter school facilities was rarely mentioned in any debate.  “Legislators assumed that charter schools would have access to existing school facilities or other buildings,” she...

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Is Your Charter School Bond a Social Bond?

  School Improvement Partnership: Social Bond Questionnaire Is the percentage of economically disadvantaged students enrolled in your charter school above 60%? Is the academic growth of those students higher than that of such students enrolled in the host district? Does your charter school have a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color)...

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Charter School Bonds: The Next Thirty Years

CHARTER SCHOOL BONDS: THE NEXT THIRTY YEARS I think I’ll take a moment, celebrate my age The ending of an era, and the turning of a page Now it’s time to focus in on where I go from here Lord, have mercy on my next 30 years Tim McGraw, “My Next Thirty Years” Thirty years ago, Minnesota became the first state to authorize charter...

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A “Hole” Bunch of Food for Thought

The doughnut economy sounds like a nice treat to have with a morning coffee but it is actually a serious rebuttal to the growth-centered economies of the present day. In 1934, the concept of gross domestic product (GDP) – the sum of consumption, investment, government spending, and exports minus imports – was created to compare the...

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Presenting….the SIP Database!

Ever struggle with finding current information on charter schools or charter school bonds?  Searching multiple department of education websites, charter school authorizer portals, EMMA and other sources is time consuming, and much of the data is locked in PDFs or other nondigital forms. The fragmentation of data sources and limited digitization...

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VIDEO: Alexis Turner on School Improvement Partnership News Hour

How is the mix of information required from charter school borrowers changing in light of COVID and the emphasis on distance learning? Alexis Turner, Director of Business Operations at School Improvement Partnership, addresses how the information bondholders require of charter schools is changing. Alexis helped to automate the production of...

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