One City Schools Is Celebrating Its 10th Anniversary: It’s All About the Children
Kaleem Caire is the founder/CEO of One City Schools, a non-instrumentality charter school that is its own school system.
by Jonathan Gramling
Kaleem Caire, the founder and CEO of One City Schools, grew up in South Madison during the 1970s-1980s. He knows what being at a disadvantage means in terms of educational attainment. And through One City Schools, he is trying to balance the scales so that Black and Brown and economically challenged children can have the same opportunities and support that other students have.
One City began 10 years ago when Caire took over the management of Child Development, Inc. pre-school on Fisher Street and has since expanded to a former WPS building on W. Broadway.
“Right now, we are at 503 students for this coming fall from ages three-months-old all the way through eighth grade,” Caire said. “We don’t know the actual demographics. We will know that when they do the September count from the third Friday of September.. We still have some spaces available. We have over 100 staff. We’re the largest employer ever started by a Black person in Dane County in terms of numbers.”
It consciously serves marginalized students including students of color, kids from low-income households and special needs students.
“The school has typically been 92 percent students of color with 68 percent African American,” Caire said. “Then we have 70 percent at the poverty level and 20 percent of students who have been identified as special need. And so we are Dane County’s most diverse school. We also have a staff of 113 people. Of that number, 56 percent are staff of color. And we have men and women teachers of color at every level. And we have several Black math teachers, which is cool. The kids can see themselves in the teaching and instruction staff and the other staff of the school. It makes a big difference.”
One City is not a private school, religious school or voucher school. It is a public school that was chartered by UW Systems. In essence, it is its own school district with a pre-school, elementary school and middle school and its attendance area is the state of Wisconsin.
“We’re public in that we have to accept all students who apply to us,” Caire said. “We can’t discriminate like a private school can and nor would we want to, which is why we started as a charter school as opposed to a voucher school. We could have done that too. We also have a broad territory that we serve. We have students coming from multiple zip codes, perhaps 30 or more. We have students coming from Beloit, Mayville, Reedsburg, and Mazomanie. And so while we are serving all students, we serve a wider footprint of young people. We aren’t bound by a geographical boundary like a city or a town like other districts are.”
Caire originally tried to get into the education field while he was the CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison back in the early 2010s. He tried to form a school Madison Prep that met with stiff resistance.
“If you would go back and look at the old arguments against Madison Prep, we were going to cream the best students and weren’t going to serve the kids with the greatest needs,” Caire recalled. “I was telling people then that wasn’t so.”
And so, after he left the Urban League, Caire gave it another try with One City. And even though Caire serves the populations that need it the most, Caire still gets a lot of push back.
“Being in an environment where charter schools — even though they are all public institutions — they are still misunderstood and not accepted by a lot of people in Madison,” Caire said. “There are people who will say, ‘We like what Kaleem is doing. We like what we hear from One City.’ But it doesn’t necessarily show up in their involvement or engagement with us. But we’re hoping that changes because now after 10 years of doing this, we hope people see that we’re serious. We’re doing a great thing. We’re serving the right population.”
One of the main differences between regular public schools is the funding differential.
“From the 2023-2024 school year, this document we put together shows that MMSD was getting $25,444 per pupil and that is what they also spend,” Caire said. “We were getting $12,000 per student. And we had to go out and raise the rest. There is a big difference between what traditional charters receive and what the traditional public schools get. But we are serving the same pool of kids. In fact, we have a much more needy population. Basically it’s like saying to people, ‘We’re going to give you a little money. And with that little money, we expect you to be better. We’re only going to give you half of the money to make it happen. So figure it out.’ That’s what it’s like. Black and Brown kids, we say we’re committed to closing the achievement gap, but the financial structure for charter schools doesn’t do that.”
And the difference is how they are operated and controlled.
“The instrumentality/non-instrumentality thing confuses people in Wisconsin,” Caire said. “Other states don’t have that system set up. The state has set it up so that local school districts — there are 421 of them — can start a charter school if they want to. And they start a charter that they want and own like it is theirs that they manage. Maybe you have a community advisory board that may want to put a plan together to start a charter. But you basically start it with the school system. Or you can have a non-instrumentality charter — an independent charter — where you have an independent board and staff who are independent of those districts that is still running the school though as a public school.”
And with this local control, One City can be more innovative while still playing by the state guidelines.
“We are trying to get our kids ready for the future and the future that they are going to have as innovators and leaders and transformational leaders in those spaces they are in so that they can also continue to contribute and give back the way that I and others have done for them,” Caire said. “The second thing is to make sure that we are also a model for what public education could do to lift all of our kids up. We hope that the community takes notice of that and leaders take notice of it and we get the support that we need.”
One City can create space within their grade levels for students who need that extra push to get up to average grade level skill sets.
“We provide athletics, K-8,” Caire said. “There are recreational/intramural athletics for kids in middle school in Madison. I don’t know if they have a larger sports program. We have that at One City. It’s very organized, so it allows us to build those scholar athletes. We have art and STEM for kids as early as second grade. So we have a lot going on that other schools could learn from. Plus we have what we call Scholars Academy. It’s for our kids in kindergarten through 4th grade who are one or more years behind academically or are too socially immature to really be successful in a heterogeneous classroom with a lot of kids. So we have two teachers with no more than 12 kids to work with them to help them get ready to be in a larger classroom setting and develop their academic skills so that they can feel confident and successful when they go into a larger classroom. And then the Prep year is a similar model. It’s for kids fifth grade through eighth grade, but typically 5-6 grade. Our goal with them is to have them more immersed in an environment for math and language arts at their ability level so that they too come to us late and don’t have the skills, they can be successful and get on a pathway for a career opportunity when they finish high school. There are a lot of unique things about us. We have the highest level of parental involvement among our parents in the community. We have an event and thousands show up to it. We’re really connected to the family.”
One of the innovations has been the length of the school year. One City begins its school year at the same time that regular public schools do. But its school year continues until the middle of July, giving the students a safe place to be during most of the summer and parents don’t have to scramble trying to make arrangements for their children. It also allows One City to give the students additional educational experiences.
“Our kids don’t lose a lot of their skills over the summer,” Caire observed. “They’re learning and are also engaged in activities. They are learning arts and other things that their parents may not be able to afford during the summer. I went to West High School. I used to feel kind of on an island because I would be in class after our spring break or getting back from summer break and ask, ‘What did you guys do this summer? What did you do this break?’ And they would say, ‘I went skiing here. I did all of this.’ And I was like, ‘Man, I just hung out and went to the mall. I went to West Towne Mall. I didn’t go anywhere.’ We didn’t have any resources to do that. So we help our kids feel culturally relevant in the city that they are in with experiences. We have our kids going and doing everything — camping, you name it — so that they have that cultural confidence, that social capital that will help them develop their economic capital going forward.”
After eighth grade, One City students attend the regular public high schools. But that doesn’t mean that One City is done with them.
“We have 25 of our students in high school this year, in the ninth grade,” Caire said. “They went to a number of high schools: Waunakee, Verona, Middleton, all the Madison schools and Edgewood. We have three kids at Edgewood High School. Next year, we’ll have 45 kids going into high school. So the numbers will get to where we have 48-50 kids in high school. All of the kids whom we sent to high school this year, we wrapped a cocoon around them. What we are worried about is all of the habits that they developed at our school, we don’t want them to lose them as they try to fit in to the culture or environment that they may find in these high schools where we see a lot of our kids not achieving. We want our kids to develop a culture and be pioneers in developing a culture of excellence with those kids. So instead of our kids following those children, we want those children to follow our kids and start going to class and doing things. That’s the only thing that I am worried about. And so we wrap a cocoon around them that is strong enough that helps them get into a groove at school so that they stay on that academic track.”
Caire feels that One City students are becoming successful and are doing better than kids with a similar demographic in the regular public schools when the comparison is apples to apples.
“It’s beautiful when you see the fruits of your labor,” Caire said. “We start to see subtle changes in kids depending on what age they start. We have children who started with us when they were three-years-old and then were in 4-K, kindergarten, first grade. They were kicking and screaming and not in a good place. But by the time they hit sixth grade, they are totally different individuals. They do chores. They can read. They are confident. That’s what we are seeing in our kids. We are providing an environment where we aren’t leaving more generations of young people to struggle.”
Caire feels One City students will make their mark.
“Our kids are going to run the city,” Caire said. “They will. I guarantee it. That’s the mindset our kids have.”
Now if only the state began to treat One City like a public school when per pupil payments are made. Who knows what could happen.