Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer, Superintendent, Springs Charter Schools

To begin with, please give us a brief introduction to where Springs Charter Schools stands today.

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: We operate seven charter schools in California, and within that, we have 21 student locations or schools. Some of them are K-12, some are K-8 and some of them are 6-12. That totals 12,000 students, and we have a soon-to-be-opened school in Smyrna, Tennessee. That program is opening in August of 2024 or just around the corner. We are also working on charters in other states. So, that’s where we stand. We started in 2000 with 17 students, and we now have 12,000 24 years later.

What will you say are the keys to the success of Springs Charter Schools? 

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: We listen to our parents, and we provide a program that partners with parents to really personalized learning for their children. Parents are always our fully invested partners because a lot of times, the kids go to school three days a week in the classroom, but they’re home two days a week with the parent, and the parent does the education on those two days under the direction of the teacher. It’s a personalized method, and the parents are a key part of our success.

Please tell us more about the different programs.

Vivian Price (Assistant Superintendent): I agree with Kathleen about listening to our parents. Our model is unique—it’s personalized. We are focused on giving every student what they need in many facets, not only their specific academics but also their social and emotional needs. We really know the whole child, and so we offer that through a variety of programs. 

As Kathleen said, we have seven charters. Within that, we have a variety of programs, including a five-day seat base that looks more traditional in terms of kids going to school each day. We also have homeschooling, where the parents are the primary educators. We have a fully virtual program where everything is done online. We actually have a couple of those programs, and then we have everything in between. For example, we have a home study, two days on-site and three days virtual. 

We also offer students signature events they would not get in a traditional school. For example, we have a science fair, participate in California’s National History Day and have proms, field trips, hangouts and graduations. We do fold in those very important things.

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: Homeschooling is an up-and-coming and one of the fastest-growing education models in the United States. However, many homeschooling parents want support and access to resources that they know they wouldn’t get if they were just homeschooling on their own.

They also want the protection of a school not just to ensure the child’s good education but also to make sure that they don’t get in trouble with the State for not schooling their children because laws are different from state to state. In California, you have to put in the paperwork that you’re a private school in order to homeschool on your own. But why would they do that if they can do a better job homeschooling?

We will do the heavy lifting for them and provide them with support for all the different things that we offer. For example, a parent who’s homeschooling might want to drop their child at one of our centers for one day a week just so that they can go to the grocery store or interact with the kid in an academic environment. Then, they have to come into the center for testing every year. 

In addition, we have field trips and events. We have full-day things where we work with the parents. We call them spree events, and the parents learn how to homeschool their children better. The students do fun activities with their peers in different rooms at the same time. These events really support our parents, not to mention that they meet with a teacher regularly, at least bi-weekly or monthly, according to how the kid is doing.

That’s our homeschooled population. We also have kids in the classroom five days a week. If a child isn’t thriving in one environment, they can move to a more or less structured environment.

You really have all the possibilities in your portfolio.

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: Yeah, lots of options.

What is the most popular option today? Is it homeschooling with your parents or online programs?

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: Hybrid is the most popular. Their kids are in school two or three days a week, or even four days a week, and with homeschooling, one day, two days or three days. Our largest chunk of students are in that program. Then, we may have 50 percent of our kids in the hybrid program. We have 25 (percent) in homeschooingl or virtual, and then 25 percent in five days a week. Hybrid is very popular because it’s the best of both worlds. It’s homeschooling without all the responsibility. We used to say homeschooling without the hassles.

How interesting! I have been interviewing educational institutions for three months now. I’m very interested in the concept of homeschooling, but I want to talk about innovation as well. Something that seems very interesting is the fact that you combine traditional education methods, but you also pick up the best practices, such as Montessori. You are always trying to look at what works and what doesn’t, doing this or disregarding that. Please tell us more about the role of innovation and how you keep up with the best practices out there that you are clearly incorporating into your charter schools.

Vivian Price: You’re right about constantly innovating and adopting new things, like revising or getting rid of things that don’t work. However, it’s important to note that in charter schools, we have to show that we’re performing as good as or better than the neighborhood schools because we get renewed every five years.

Like you said, a traditional school might just keep chugging away with something ineffective. By contrast, we’ll go out of business if we do that. We really have to have our finger on the pulse of what the community wants for their children and what the trends are to which we’re headed. 

This is why when we went to all virtual, especially with the pandemic, we already had a virtual program. It was small, but we were able to pivot very quickly and got all of our teachers trained for online education. We didn’t miss a day of schooling, and we developed lesson plans for our whole community. Traditional schools, not our partners but traditional school leaders, tapped into some of our resources. We offered free lessons for parents with teachers online. 

Because of that, what happened after the global pandemic is that people, like Kathleen mentioned, were looking now for more home-based learning. Their work shifted to home. We quickly looked at what kinds of programs are unique. We offer a Montessori Online Program, which is a very unique offering. Parents are totally at home with a virtual Montessori program. We just built our offerings with the virtual because we know parents want it. However, we also want to offer something that’s a little different. Montessori is a good example of that. You’re not going to get that everywhere. Innovation is always looking around to see what’s not in the community. 

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: With the push towards rigor over the last 15 years, many high schools have gotten rid of all their career technical education programs, including many of their wood shop and metal shop programs. One of our schools is on the grounds of an airport, where we can provide career, technical and mechanical education, a variety of areas of hospitality, and other things related to airport public works.

That has been a big push. If students want a traditional high school program, they will not come to us because our high school program is much smaller. A regular high school campus has at least 2,000 kids, while our high school is typically 250 students. As such, everybody knows pretty much everybody. All the teachers know all the kids. It’s a smaller environment. You don’t have a football team and those other things that you might want to have.

For our students, though, it’s the right choice because we personalize. They do internships. Our goal is for every student to do an internship in their junior and senior year. They’re actually working in a field they might be interested in to see if they are really interested. 

For example, my daughter did an internship there and found out that she thought she wanted to be a vet. She loves dogs. She’s like a big, huge fan. However, when she actually went out and did a 12-hour a week or a whole semester, she realized, “Oh, I like dogs that are happy and well, not scared and not sick. It’s just depressing because these people won’t take care of their animals because they don’t want to spend the money.” 

Now, she’s going to be a civil engineer. Actually, she’s graduating in a couple of weeks. That saved her $120,000 of additional costs for vet school. She’s going to get gainful employment in September. She starts her new job, and it’s out after only four years of a bachelor’s degree. That’s what engineering gets you. You can start working immediately.

Vivian Price: Many of our students have examples like that because of the internship. To expand that, we get some of our innovation from our partnerships with community members, including colleges. We are sending kids out.

Part of our mission is also to make the community the classroom. For us, learning happens beyond the walls of the school building or classroom. We have students who not only complete internships and work experiences but also enroll in college. We ensure that all of our students have at least one college course before graduation. Many students can actually finish up, preferably two. Mostly, they do because we actually just fold it right into their curriculum. Many students are out getting a full year of college before they’re even enrolled. 

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: A lot of American high schools do AP (advanced placement) classes. We don’t do AP classes. AP classes are a way to get college credit, but through testing into it. However, the AP tests aren’t very fair because you have to be a very good AP teacher, the kids have to be there five days a week, and they have to be basically cramming for the test. The test is very difficult, and only an experienced teacher will get the majority of their children through it.

However, if you take a community college class as a student and we support you, you’re likely to be successful. Most of those kids are going to pass that class. They have real experience being in a college class. They have real credits that will translate to a university. It’s a better method. It’s a self-esteem-building method as opposed to the opposite.

Understood. What feedback are you getting from the community? Is there any specific interaction with a parent or student that you would like to mention?

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: One thing is that we won a national award, the National Charter School Award, for supporting through the pandemic because we provided education to the entire world. Anybody who got on our website could access our courses and our live teacher asynchronous instruction. If they wanted to join while we were offering it, they could. We recorded it and kept it on there for them. It’s been a few years now since the pandemic, but we did get that.

Ultimately, our families are very happy, and that’s why we have such strong enrollment. We have waiting lists at most of our centers because parents like what we offer. They want their kids to be excited about school, engaged and passionate. 

Building a lifelong learner requires two things. First, it requires the student to be excited about learning and interested in and curious about the world. Typical schooling sometimes does not encourage that. Second, they need the skills to know that they can set goals and reach them through a variety of learning methods. They need to learn how to learn, and they can take that on themselves, not just wait for the teacher to teach it to them. 

As such, a big part of our curriculum is empowering students by teaching them how to set goals, work a plan, reach the plan and all of that. Like I said, if you’re sitting in a class getting lectured all day and you’re taking notes, you are not empowered; you’re not figuring out how you learn best. Our big thing is that we want the students to really own and have agency over their learning. It’s their learning journey. 

After graduation, that translates to a person who knows how to learn new things and isn’t scared of them. This is a very typical problem when you finish high school. You go to college, and it’s a huge campus, and you’re completely lost. A lot of people fail in the first year because they are not ready for that. They don’t know how to manage their own time. 

It’s actually been studied that prisoners have more free choice than high school students in in an American school. They don’t have any choice at all. They’re told where to sit and what to do every hour of the day, and they walk to the next class. They have hardly any free time whatsoever, so they’re not learning how to manage their time. The only time they can manage is a couple of hours after school. There’s nobody there to support them unless their parents are actively involved in supporting that skill set development.

We have covered quite a bit. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention as well? Anything that you feel particularly proud of that comes to mind.

Vivian Price: She touched on this. The smaller school settings really do appeal to students who, in many cases, are not thriving or not even surviving in a traditional school setting. You can really see where we make an impact on kids who might be suffering from medical or mental health issues or bullying at schools. 

We’re attractive to people who want the five days but want a smaller setting. It is important to us. It’s part of our model that we have a holistic understanding of kids. As Kathleen mentioned, everybody in the school knows just about every kid’s name and what’s going on with them. We’re that small school environment, not a small class size. 

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: Every one of our classrooms has both a teacher and an instructional aid. We call that instructional aid an Assistant Classroom Educator (ACE). We will have 30 or 32 kids in every class, but there are two adults working in that class to their benefit. They’re with the class all day–recess, lunch, every time. They’re with those two people all day long, and that definitely helps to build the relationship. We have a small school. The largest school we have is 700, 710 or 720 students in total. 

Vivian Price: We were also recognized in a recent Stanford CREDO report for closing the achievement gap for special populations, such as English language learners and students with disabilities. Again, you get there by having those relationships and really understanding what each student needs.

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: Most of our centers loop the child at least two years in a row with the same children and teachers. That is very helpful in building those relationships. 

Vivian was talking about that CREDO report. It’s a clearing house on educational

research, and this one is related to charter schools. It was looking at whether charter schools are better than traditional schools, and this is the third time the report has been done. The first time, the answer was no. The second time, the answer was we were the same (as traditional schools). The third time or this last time, the answer is we’re better than the traditional district schools. Not everybody is better, but it’s true overall or on average. 

We were found to have closed the gap for the children who are the most likely to struggle. These are English learners and those in our demographics, like African Americans or Hispanics, who tend to perform less. We have been closing the gap for those kids. That’s been great to find out because that was independently done research. We didn’t even have access to the type of data that they had to do this study.

What key message would you like to send across?

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: In today’s world, the five-day-a-week factory model of education is absolutely not the only way. A more flexible school environment works best for families and children, and people need to open their eyes. This is the way of the future. This is the model. We are the model of the future.

Kids learn from the community, and they need to spend some time out of the classroom, learning outside in the world, because that’s where they’re going to be the rest of their lives. They’re going to be learning, and it’s not going to be most of it in a classroom.

What is your vision for Springs Charter Schools for the next 3 to 5 years?

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: We want to provide more and grow because we are planning to open several centers to ensure that we are providing more hands-on, real-world education. For example, one of the models we’re petitioning to open is a farm school model, which will give the students more opportunities (for real-life experiences). 

In the afternoons, every day after the academics are done, they’re going to go out there, and each group will rotate through different aspects of a farm. They might work with the chickens for six weeks, then they go and work on the crops for another six weeks, and they learn all about that by hands-on doing. They might fix the fence, and they could even learn to crochet or whatever hands-on things they aren’t learning now, produce something and help them to apply their learning in the classroom into a real thing that really matters. This is as opposed to creating a paper project or a diorama that sits on their shelf. Let’s build a little pen for a chicken instead of building a pretend pen for a chicken with paper, or let’s build it with paper, and then let’s take it out and build it on the farm. 

Vivian Price: I would also like to mention something connected to our vision. Of course, all of the work we do in the organization is on behalf of children. However, we also care about the field of education. We have a vision for growing more teachers, and we have partnered with universities to recruit teachers with teaching degrees to work with our school. 

We would like to grow our own teacher program in partnership with UMass Global. That is just in general. We have a vision to keep education as a career that is appealing to people, respectable and highly regarded. We want teachers who love their work. As such, we have committed our time and efforts to helping to develop people who want to be teachers and have a heart for teaching.

Definitely, and as you can also get to work at Springs Charter, I’m sure you also get more purpose.

Vivian Price: Yes, I think so exactly.

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: Everybody in education wants to do right by the kids, but the system isn’t always set up for the kids to succeed, quite frankly. The kids we get coming to us a lot of times just couldn’t succeed in that kind of rigid environment. We have a lot of autistic kids who can’t tolerate that kind of setting. They need a little more flexible environment. They need to be able to spend a few hours at school and a few hours at home—this kind of thing.

Moreover, we’re totally fun and flexible. That’s one of our core values. We like to be flexible. It benefits the kids and the families.

I’m guessing many parents are relieved when they find you and the options you offer. 

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: Many families stay with us for years and years. They school their children through all the grades. They’re very thankful for our option. We’re a free public school option. We don’t charge for anything.

Vivian Price: We’re open for all students. 

Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer: We have all the types of kids.