The zen of how to start a school.” That was one of the things Larry Rosenstock wanted to talk about at an elegant luncheon in June 2013 at the private University Club in downtown Milwaukee.
“You want to keep it simple,” he told an audience of 150 or so, including business leaders and philanthropists. He said you don’t want a school to be too stuck in its ways, and you want it to be a place that has, as he put it, a lot of oxygen.
Rosenstock was a carpenter, a lawyer and a business executive before becoming a nationally recognized education innovator.
He was the founder of High Tech High in San Diego. It opened with 200 students in 2000 and now has about 5,000 students in 12 schools. Its unusual program is built in large part on students learning by doing projects, and its student body is intentionally highly diverse by income and race. Data on student success is impressive and educators have come to observe from across the United States.
Rosenstock was at the luncheon in Milwaukee to support an idea, then called the Forest Exploration Center, that would include an eye-catchingly different school and other programs, based in a historic building on what is known now as the Innovation Campus in Wauwatosa.
He said such projects are exactly what is needed to get many teens on the path to success in education and careers. “We are all in with these folks,” he said.
That was the next to last time I heard anything about the plan that suggested forward movement. The last time was a short time later when the Legislature changed law provisions related to charter schools to make the idea feasible.
Other than that, what I heard was all about problems: The concept and leadership changed. It was tough getting support. There was a lot of resistance from officials in Wauwatosa who thought this was going to take away students and money from their school system.