Vancouver’s first public charter school, Rooted Vancouver, opened its doors last fall with an ambitious goal: to see its students graduate with a local job offer in one hand and a college acceptance letter in the other.
Recently updated state demographic data shows that Rooted had among the most promising starts of any public charter school in Washington.
The tech-focused school, which is free to all, served a cohort of 25 to 30 ninth-graders in the 2023-2024 school year. All but two students who finished the school year plan to return for 10th grade, school director Steven Carney said. The school will also welcome another ninth-grade student cohort of about 30 to 35 students this fall.
By its fourth year of operation — which would be the 2026-2027 school year — Rooted hopes to serve a maximum of 140 students in grades nine through 12 with a student-teacher ratio of 7 to 1.
“Our size is the biggest draw,” Carney said. “We have a better chance of actually meeting the individual needs of our students. We have a focus. We don’t have to be everything to everybody.”
Another positive sign for the school: Carney said the school received a clean audit of its special education services from the state.
As it stands, 43 percent of Rooted’s students qualified for special services, which is the highest proportion among charter schools in Washington. Carney points to the school’s small size as reason for its success on that front so far.
“All of our teachers own the (Individualized Education Plans) of each student,” he said. “Many systems rely on the special education teacher to do that.”
Public charters
The public charter model is fairly new for Washington. The first school opened in 2014 and only 17 such schools continue to operate statewide. Most are in the Puget Sound area.
Like any school in Washington, public charters adhere to learning standards established by the state Office of Superintendent of Instruction. At Rooted, 10401 N.E. Fourth Plain Blvd., Vancouver, students take semester-long classes and receive grades in the same system as public schools. A key difference, however, is that Rooted also prioritizes helping students identify internship or apprenticeship programs that might be a step toward employment after graduation.
Promotion of diversity in representation and students served is written into the foundation of charter law in Washington. As a result, the average demographics of public charters are far more diverse than the average Washington public school.
Among 17 charters in Washington in the 2023-24 school year, 38 percent of students served were white, compared with 48 percent statewide. Charter personnel, too, are more diverse: 57 percent of charter staff are white, compared with 86 percent statewide. This data did not include demographics from Rooted, as the school’s sample size is still too small.
Carney said a majority of Rooted’s staff are people of color and that he hopes that model will continue in order to best serve the minority-majority population in the Fourth Plain Boulevard corridor.
“I know a lot of districts have done equity audits and have responded accordingly,” Carney said. “What’s unique is that we get to build the school from the ground up with those things in place. We don’t have to undo or redo anything, we have that culture from the get-go.”
Getting established
Washington’s charter school regulations are strict. A state law capped the total number of charters allowed to apply for certification between 2016 and 2021 to 40. Rooted was authorized in 2020 and spent three years preparing for its opening last fall. State officials say the limits aren’t intended to diminish the potential scope of public charters, but rather to ensure that any schools that do open have high standards for operation.
“A lot of things have to happen even before a school is authorized. You have to have a board of directors, approved curricula and a plan for hiring staff,” said Jessica de Barros, executive director of the Washington State Charter Commission, the body that oversees all public charters in the state.
Opening a new school, like opening a new business, comes with its share of obstacles. There’s the challenge of getting the word out, developing a customer base and establishing trust in the community.
For a charter school those challenges are amplified. The concept itself is foreign to many people, especially since Southwest Washington has never had a charter school, said Rooted board director Adrienne Mason.
“Being the first charter school in the area is hard. People hear charter and think private school, so they count themselves out,” said Mason, who also serves as the Southwest regional director of nonprofit Akin, formerly known as the Children’s Home Society of Washington. “We want to get past that narratives, to educate people that they are free.”
In practice, however, charters are fairly similar to alternative choice schools — a model with plenty of examples in Clark County, including Vancouver School for Arts and Academics and Battle Ground’s River HomeLink Academy.
So instead of a focus on performing arts, for example, Rooted aims to have its students gain skills in technology coding. Last year, Rooted had a class for its students to learn Unity, a video game developing software. Next year, Carney said students will work toward Google certifications.
Alternative choice schools have increased in popularity in Clark County since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend that Mason said helped her buy in to the long-term viability of Rooted.
“Since I’m working with kids so often, it’s evident to me that traditional public school isn’t for every student. And that’s not a knock to the public school system, I think we do a great job in Washington,” she said. “But here, I think we’re trying to do really niche work similar to how public schools established magnet options.”
As it welcomes its second cohort of students, the state charter commission will continue to visit Rooted and observe its board meetings.
“We were really pleased, the school seems to be implementing the application that it proposed with fidelity,” de Barros said. “They’re on track to be successful.”
