Page 7 - BusinessWest September 19, 2022

What stood out to her — and eventually com- pelled her to start a new charter school — were the expectations for students and the system’s inability to prepare students for success.
“The expectations for students in Springfield were not that high,” she told BusinessWest, add- ing that this is how and when the seeds were planted for a new charter school.
She started by looking at urban settings with similar demographics but different results when it came to student performance and success.
“We went to New Haven and Boston, where we found schools serving similar populations
of students and getting very different results,” she said. “These kids were outperforming their neighboring wealthy districts, like kids in East Boston outperforming kids in Wellesley, and we saw the same in New Haven, and we went and looked at those schools and said, ‘wow, what are they doing?’ They were charter schools.”
The schools were different in some ways, but a common denominator was a needed level of autonomy to “actually respond to the needs of the kids in front of them and create the kind of school and systems that could generate different
results.”
Fast-forwarding significantly — getting a char-
ter school off the ground is a lengthy, complicat- ed ordeal — Romano set about creating Veritas, a middle school that would “reset the bar,” as she put it, one that borrowed (‘stole’ was the word she used) best practices from high-achieving schools, set high standards for its students, and prepared them for high school.
And, as noted earlier, it wasn’t long before par- ents and students alike were asking if the same model could be used to create a high school, questions that grew louder as the first classes of Veritas students were graduating and moving on to the city’s schools.
Eventually, the chorus became too loud to ignore, she went on, adding that she went to the Veritas board of trustees with the concept of a high school, and the ambitious concept was greeted with enthusiasm.
A request for expansion was submitted to
the state Department of Education in 2019, and, upon approval, what became a two-year plan- ning process commenced. With that time, a design team comprised of former students (those
now in high school or their first year of college), current students, families, teachers, staff mem- bers, representatives of area colleges, and com- munity partners put together for a blueprint for a high school.
Course of Action
And by blueprint, she meant not just the actu- al design of the school — and its gym. Rather, she meant a plan for helping to make sure that graduates of the school would not have doors closed to them.
“
college transcript; they’ll have a track record of success in college when they graduate.”
“We looked at different models, and we looked into what was happening — where is the innova- tion in high schools now,” she said, putting the accent on ‘we.’ “We focused on what we could do better and what we could do that was different.”
And the chosen model was early college, or EC, as it’s called, she said, adding that it is a somewhat unique model for this region.
“There’s not a lot of it in happening in Massa- chusetts,” Romano went on. “There’s a lot of talk
Veritas
Continued on page 75
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