In the past 18 months, immediately after Jinkins told Elliott, her PTA president, about charter schools, a core group of 15 parents and teachers worked more than 2,500 hours. They sweated over the charter application. Then, after getting permission in March to open a school, they busied themselves acquiring loans, raising money, designing the curriculum and doing anything else that was needed. NYOS enrolled 120 students in kindergarten through seventh grade, most of whom were children who hadn't thrived in public schools but whose parents found private school too costly. About 20 percent were home-schooled last year.
Small classes are part of the school's allure.
Its bylaws include a promise that the student-teacher ratio can't exceed 15 to 1. Kent Miller, a deputy sheriff in Travis County who worked off-duty security for the school for two days, kept slipping into the classrooms to observe. This one looks like it's modeled after a private school. Two days later, Miller enrolled his seventh-grade daughter, Mary. A look at some charter schools that opened this year in Texas Charter schools were launched in Texas in 1995 under the premise that these schools could be more creative because they would be designed by the parents and teachers for the schools' students.