money could be the death knell. Right now. Just keep talking with me.’ I ended up getting Joe and them involved. By the time I got them involved, we were at about $300,000 in the bank. When I got those guys involved, we quickly turned around another $600,000 including Joe and his wife who gave $150,000. Gordon gave $50,000. Diane Ballweg and others started giving to it. And we ended up starting the school in September 2015, one year later.”

One City held their programming at Fountain of Life Church while their Fisher Street building underwent a $1.1 million renovation.

“Sally Martyniak and Forward Community Investments purchased the building for us and leased it back to us for a dollar until we could buy it from them,” Caire said. “The city of Madison gave $300,000 towards that purchase in 2018. Sally asked me, ‘Kaleem, if we purchase the building for you, will you pursue the school?’ I was like, ‘Heck yes.’ That was in October 2014. We formed a board and had our first meeting in the bottom of CDI. And she started working towards helping us. She had to come off the board immediately and started working to help us buy this building. They did that and we were able to get in there. We moved in in June 2016 and had 16 kids. Within one year, we had 52 kids plus a waiting list.”

It was at this time that Marilyn Ruffin — who would become the first African American elected to the Sun Prairie School Board — joined One City.

“Marilyn Ruffin came in 2017,” Caire said. “I was hogging her. We were working on some other stuff and she was looking for other opportunities. I was home praying, ‘Please don’t let those other opportunities come through for her.’ I really wanted her to come here. Every time I saw Marilyn, she was resourceful. ‘Have you heard about this? Have you heard about that?’ I saw her volunteering over at Overture and getting tickets. I said, ‘I need someone like that who is going to open up the door for our families to opportunities in the community. She came on board and started doing that.”

And that next year, the educational world opened up to One City.

“By 2017, the UW System got the opportunity from the legislature and Walker to charter schools throughout the state,” Caire said. “It was their president Ray Cross who said at one of the first kick-off meetings when he got his job, ‘Kaleem, why didn’t you guys get the charter? I don’t understand that. What would you do if we got the ability to charter schools? Would you do it?’ I said, ‘Heck yes.’ Ray said, ‘I don’t want to do this unless we have at least have one school.’ Later he called me and said, ‘We have the opportunity. The legislature is going to vote on this and the governor is going to sign it.’ That was 2017. And in 2018, the families wanted to stay at One City and we always wanted to build this pipeline. So we put the application in December 2017 and then we got approved and in September 2018, we moved into the charter school. We had pre-school and a 4K. When we started a charter, we had to make room for a second kindergarten. And so we had two 4K and two kindergartens in our public school. And we just added a grade per year until this year when we added another grade level, 4^th grade.”

In 2021, Once City got a major boost when it received a grant from Pleasant Rowland that allowed them to purchase a building on the WPS campus on W. Broadway in Monona. They now had the capacity and then with the contract signing in February with Interim UW Systems President Tommy Thompson, Once City got the green light to expend its educational services through secondary education. And it will continue to serve the most vulnerable students.

“Most of our kids are African American or biracial and have at least one Black parent, around 85 percent,” Caire said. “We have a growing population of Latino students and every demographic is starting to grow. It will be interesting to see where we end up next year. We want to maintain a population that is at minimum 50 percent poverty. We dipped a little below that this year. We’re consistent with the Madison school system. Because we are one of the few options in the city, one of only that is tuition free, we’re going to get a lot of families who come here and we don’t want to turn families that have means away because we can’t. We want a little bit of everyone. But we want to make sure that our most vulnerable kids have an option to go here first.”

Being able to serve youth from two-years through high school creates a lot of educational opportunities for One City students.

“Our kids are going to start being immersed in college and career opportunities like learning about colleges and getting a taste of them in 6-8 grade because between 9-10 grades, they are going to start taking classes,” Caire said. “I posted on social media this minute long video from UW-Oshkosh, which is one of our partners. We have Madison College, and UW-Madison who are the other two. We’re going to add more who are literally going to allow our kids to start taking college classes as early as 9^th grade. We’re working with UW-Madison on a five-year bachelor’s in education program where our students will start on that in 9^th grade and do one extra year with us and complete their bachelor’s degree and we would use our per pupil allocation to pay for their tuition. They will have their bachelor’s by the time they are 19-years-old. They’ll have their master’s by 21.”

While things have been breaking One City’s way, it like all other schools and school districts, experienced a whole new set of challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It has been crazy running schools in the middle of COVID,” Caire said. “We’re testing kids this year even though we know it’s been another COVID school year. Why are we doing that? It’s not going to tell us anything. Schools haven’t adjusted because communities haven’t. The struggle for us is we have a lot of challenges with some of our families who have struggled through COVID either financially, mentally or both. The lack of trust that we have seen even in our own school with some of our families. Before COVID, people could stop by and see their kid and talk to us. If something wasn’t right in the classroom, we could talk it out. People would stand in that front foyer and we were having conversations. We were doing the programs, events and academy presentations. The last one we held before COVID at Madison College almost 300 people showed up. And then all of a sudden, our parents are dropping their kids off like laundry at the dry cleaners. They drop them off in their car and then go. Our school isn’t designed for that. And so families haven’t been able to come into the building during the school day to see what is going on and look at the classrooms. And as a result, they are now listening to their kids. And if their child says something is or isn’t happening, they are going with that. Some of the relationships that our teachers were able to build with the parents has diminished. We have to figure out how to get that back between now and next year.”

And as a public charter school, One City has also been impacted by the tight purse strings of the Wisconsin legislature.

“We have to look within our schools and say we have to invest more because our kids have lost so much,” Caire emphasized. “If we are going to catch this generation off the loss — we have 4^th graders testing at the 2^nd grade level — because they have been out of school. We’re not making the investments where we need to. Schools are sucking wind. COVID funding wasn’t enough. We’ll get $100,000 and we’re spending $700,000 on extra staff and COVID mitigation strategies. It doesn’t put a dent in what we need.”

Nonetheless, One City is poised to fulfill the vision and dream that Kaleem Caire had over 15 years ago. With perseverance, commitment, hard work and the right game plan, One City has come from a dream to a 900 student reality. Yes dreams do come true.