On this special pop-up episode of She Thinks, we discuss the need for expanding school choice options and empowering parents to take control of their children’s education. Parents across the country are seeking a choice in how and where their children learn. States like Florida have created numerous school choice programs that allow education funding to follow students. Erika Donalds joins She Thinks to discuss why parents deserve more leverage when it comes to their children’s education, and the network of classical charter schools she has created in Florida.

Erika Donalds is a mother of three boys and a finance executive with a passion for education. She is a former elected member of the Collier County School Board. During her tenure, she co-founded the Florida Coalition of School Board Members and served as the group’s president. She has served on Governor DeSantis’ Advisory Committee on Education and Workforce Development, the state’s Education Practices Commission, and the Florida Constitution Revision Commission. Erika is President and CEO of The Optima Foundation, a non-profit established to support and expand superior schools of choice, and also leads the School Choice Movement, an advocacy arm that works to engage and empower communities in the battle for education freedom.

Learn more about putting kids first in education.


TRANSCRIPT

Beverly Hallberg:

Hey everyone, it’s Beverly Hallberg. Welcome to a special pop-up episode of She Thinks, your favorite podcast from the Independent Women’s Forum, where we talk with women and sometimes men about the policy issues that impact you and the people you care about most. Enjoy.

Ginny Gentles:

Hi there, I’m Ginny Gentles, Senior Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. I’m joined today by a special guest to discuss school choice and empowering parents to take control of their children’s education. Erika Donalds is a mother of three boys and a finance executive with a passion for education. She has used her expertise in business to create a network of classical charter schools in Florida, and further the expansion of high-quality education options in that state. Erika is a former elected member of the Collier County School Board. During her tenure, she co-founded the Florida Coalition of School Board Members and served as the group’s president. She has served on Governor DeSantis’ advisor commission on education and workforce development, the state’s Education Practices Commission, and the Florida Constitution Revision Commission. Erika is president and CEO of the Optima Foundation, a non-profit established to support and expand superior schools of choice, and also leads the School Choice Movement, an advocacy arm which works to engage and empower communities in the battle for education freedom.

Welcome Erika, it is a pleasure to have you on She Thinks.

Erika Donalds:

Thank you so much for having me.

Ginny Gentles:

Before we discuss the network of classical charter schools that you’ve launched, please share with us the origin of your support for school choice. I think I’ve heard both from remarks that your husband has made, and from what I’ve read, that you needed to find an alternative education option for one of your sons?

Erika Donalds:

Yeah, absolutely. Just like a lot of parents I’m sure that are listening, I made the school choice option that most middle-class families do. I bought a house in the neighborhood where I wanted my kids to go to school, and I’m very grateful to be able to make that choice, but I found out that, with three boys, despite them all coming from the same household, they were all very different, very different learners. The school that may have worked for my oldest didn’t work for my middle child and I had to find an alternative, and that’s when I found out that there weren’t enough school choice options for me, and certainly for families who do not have means to pay for private school in my community, and that’s what really got me involved.

Ginny Gentles:

So what kinds of schools have your sons attended? I believe, is your oldest in college now? You’ve kind of walked all the way through the K-12 system with one.

Erika Donalds:

I have. My oldest is a freshman at The College of the Holy Cross and playing football there. Very happy for him. My second child is at a private school and my third is at a charter school. But between the three of them, we’ve done public zone schools, we’ve done out-of-zone public school, we’ve been charter, and we’ve done private schools and even some homeschooling. So I have definitely run the gamut. And every year, just like many parents, we reevaluate what is going to be the best option for our children for that particular school year, and we make the choice that’s best for them.

Ginny Gentles:

So how do you go about that process when you’re evaluating education options? How do you decide we need to transfer from one school to this other one?

Erika Donalds:

Well, certainly, if a school is working well for a child and you don’t feel like you need to make a change, that’s great, but when it’s not working or when you’re transitioning, perhaps from elementary school to middle school, there are a lot of factors to consider: the child’s personality, what their interests are, the types of education that are being offered, the reputation of the schools.

There are middle schools in my community that have a very bad reputation for the behavior of the students and the morality standards that are operating in that school. I chose not to send my children to public middle schools because I didn’t like the activities that were happening there. As a school board member, I knew about many of them. So I think, for every family, there is a lot that goes into selecting a school. Sometimes it’s just convenience because parents want to spend as much time with their children as possible, and they might want to have a school near their place of work so they have those drive times and that they’re nearby to go and visit their children at lunchtime. But I feel like parents need to make those decisions on what their priorities are, whether it’s the curriculum, the location, or just the environment of the school, and what’s going to be best for their kids.

Ginny Gentles:

That absolutely makes sense. And it could change over time, those criteria as you’re evaluating each year, right?

Erika Donalds:

Absolutely. And for each child.

Ginny Gentles:

So I’ve been following your career a bit from afar, and I’ve been reading about your accomplishments over the years, and I’ve gotten the impression that when you encounter a problematic barrier, you don’t just find a way around the solution, you actually create a very concrete solution. So for example, while you were serving on your community school board, you founded the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, partially in response to the existing Florida School Boards Association’s opposition to school choice. You didn’t just protest their opposition to school choice, you founded a competing organization, which is awesome. So tell us about your approach to overcoming the traditional public education system’s opposition to innovation.

Erika Donalds:

Yeah, that was a pretty epic move on our part and the Florida School Boards Association, of course, did not like that we provided an alternative for school board members to belong to an organization that actually aligned with their values. But it was great. It did have quite an impact, especially at the state level. When I was on the school board, I was in the minority, and it was very difficult to get anything accomplished as a school board member in Collier County at the time. But what I found is that I did have a bully pulpit at the state level to advocate on behalf of school choice as a school board member, which gave me a different platform, and I banded together with other school board members to do that, and I think we had a great impression at the time, and we’ve all gone on to do some great things, including some of them founding Moms for Liberty, which is making a tremendous impact at school boards around the country.

But you’re right, that is something that has been a staple of my career, both in business and now in education. I am a no-excuses person, and I am focused on results. I don’t want to hear any excuses, I want to hear how are you going to overcome this problem. And what we find in traditional education and the establishment education system is a lot of excuses and not a lot of solutions and innovation. That’s what I’m here to do, to shake up the establishment, to show them that the excuses are unwarranted, and to bring results for students and for families that cannot be denied, and in fact, that level of competition and innovation is going to force the traditional public school system to innovate and get better.

Ginny Gentles:

We at IWF, absolutely agree with your goals there and definitely want to support your work and thank you for talking with us today about what you’re doing, it’s encouraging. You founded this organization, School Choice Movement. What is that advocacy organization specifically doing in order to forward those goals that you were laying out?

Erika Donalds:

Well, a lot of what the School Choice Movement has been about is educating families about the myths that are perpetuated by the education establishment about school choice—things like that charter schools drain money from the public school system. The opposite is true, that as charter schools open and students are selected into those schools by their families, the per-student amount that traditional public schools get goes up because those charter schools don’t receive dollar for dollar the money that should be following that child. So these are the type of myths that we look to overcome in the community so that families can feel good about making choices.

In Florida, we have a lot of school options and those are expanding every year, and we need a way to communicate with families so that they know what their choices are. They may ultimately choose their neighborhood school, but we want to empower them to be able to vote with their feet if they want to, if they need to, if it’s best for their children. So it’s important that families are paying attention and that we reach them in a way that is accessible and in a way that they can act on those choices that they do have.

Ginny Gentles:

Well Erika, you may not know this but, years ago, I was actually in charge of the school choice office at the Florida Department of Education, and a big part of the work that I was doing there was trying to ensure that families knew about their options. Florida’s remarkable, and I frequently brag about the expensive options in my home state. You all have, at this point, education savings accounts, a scholarship program for children with special needs, scholarship program that your husband created while he was serving in the state legislature for bullied students, and then close to 700 charter schools serving 340,000 students, and then, of course, thriving homeschool communities that have only grown in recent years.

So that all sounds like a school choice utopia to those of us who are currently living in states with very few options. And I hear what you’re saying, those options might exist, but you have to really ensure that parents know about them and are taking advantage of them. What else needs to happen in Florida? It sounds like you have everything.

Erika Donalds:

It does sound like that, which is a little frustrating for school choice advocates in Florida, because we know the reality. The reality is that my neighbors in Naples, Florida, don’t have very many options. I mean, we can say we have these scholarships, but they’re still limited by income and there are a ton of gap families who make too much to qualify for scholarship programs, but too little to pay for private school, especially for more than one child if they needed that. So it’s important that Florida continues to increase those income levels to capture those families who cannot afford private school and need an alternative outside of their zone school.

Our charter schools, while there are many of them across the state, there aren’t many in a lot of communities and because they don’t get the same level of funding as our traditional public schools, they often do not have transportation options when it comes to school buses, so they aren’t as accessible as we need them to be for families who require an alternative.

So while we are the school choice state, and I fully embrace that, and I’m very proud of what our state has done. There’s so much more to be done to really hang the banner, so to speak, and other states to follow along where every single family has multiple options to select what’s best for their students. If families did know about the scholarships that are available to them, and they took advantage fully of those scholarships, there would be nowhere near enough private school seats taking scholarships to meet the need and the demand that would take place. So we have to keep working on the supply side and increasing eligibility, and we have to also work… I’m sorry, in the demand side, increasing eligibility, but also the supply side, bringing high-quality private schools, as well as charter schools, in order to meet those demands and increase funding for charter schools to allow them to make it more accessible through transportation.

Ginny Gentles:

Well, Erica, you practice what you preach. You have founded the Optima Foundation, which is launching a network of charter schools, not just in your community, but elsewhere in the state as well. So you’re addressing the supply side, you’re creating these charter schools. Tell us about these schools and the philosophy behind them. I understand they’re classical charter schools.

Erika Donalds:

Yes. I fell in love with the classical model of education when I was looking for school choice, as I said earlier for my middle son. And he went from a traditional, more progressive environment into the classical environment, and it was night and day. It’s a really knowledge-based education. Students are learning historical facts. There’s no wasted time in their reading. Instead of reading a first-grade-level book about Mr. Frog going to the mailbox, they’re reading about the pilgrims, they’re reading about George Washington at grade level. So they walk away, and they get in the car at the end of the day with a ton of stories and information in their brains. It’s explicit phonics, explicit grammar, learning the great books. And it’s been proven over thousands of years that this is a great way to educate our future leaders.

So what I did was create this organization based on my business background as a CPA and a former CFO compliance officer for an investment management firm that manages the entire business side of charter schools, which we know is one of the major reasons why charter schools struggle. It’s because these are multi-million dollar businesses and they need professionals to run that side of things so that the academic professionals can focus on that most important work, and that is meeting the needs of our students and our families. That’s what the Optima Foundation does.

We manage everything on the compliance side—finance, budget, building, construction—and we allow our academic professionals and especially those that are classically trained and committed to the classical model of education to educate our teachers and to educate our students in this way, and it’s worked out extremely well. We’re seeing huge demand everywhere we go; I cannot open them fast enough. We’ve been opening one a year for the last three years. We start on two a year next year, and we’re just going to continue to open as many as we can to meet the demand that we see from families across the state.

Ginny Gentles:

Will the charter schools just be opening in Florida at this point? Is that part of your plan or is there any hope for the rest of us outside of Florida?

Erika Donalds:

I hope to definitely work our way into other states. What we see in Florida… You mentioned there’s almost 700 charter schools in Florida; only 14 of them are currently classical charter schools. So there’s still a huge demand in my home state here, and I want to go ahead and meet that as best we can. As a nonprofit, we provide some assistance to groups outside of Florida who are looking to open a classical charter school in their community through sort of a consulting work that they can access for free. So people who are outside of Florida are welcome to contact the Optima Foundation and we can plug them into those resources that will help them to do it as well.

Ginny Gentles:

I’m sure a part of your consideration for expanding beyond the state would be the quality of the charter school law and the structure that’s in place supporting charter schools in those states. I live in Virginia, there’s a terrible charter school law here. I know you won’t come here yet until I help state advocates fix that. But thankfully you are in Florida, in a state that does have laws that overtime have been put in place to ensure that high-quality school choice options can thrive. Glad that you’re there and advocating for school choice and expanding school choice options by opening these charter schools. Where are your schools at this point?

Erika Donalds:

Treasure Coast Classical Academy is in Stuart, Florida. It’s just north of Palm Beach. We have grades K-8 there this year. We start sometimes at a K-6 and then they move up. We end up a K-12, but there’s 1200 students at TCCA with another over 700 on the waiting list. And we’re opening a high school there, getting started on that construction, and we’re also going to open a second location in Martin County, in that community, seeing all that demand. We have a Jacksonville school, Jacksonville Classical Academy, near downtown. Also, that opened last year in the middle of the pandemic, and we’re opening a second Jacksonville location next school year.

And Naples Classical Academy opened this year. Next year, not only do we have that Jacksonville school opening, but we’re also launching Optima Classical Academy, which is an online classical school. It’s going to be available across the state of Florida as a public option, and it’s a really exciting project that we’ve been working on in response to the pandemic really and the lack of quality online options that we’ve seen, not just in Florida, but across the country. We’re going to bring a classical model of education online and deliver the live instruction through virtual reality. So it’s going to be an immersive classroom environment that can also be transported to the Constitutional Convention or outer space or ancient Rome, and the classroom can really be part of the experience for our Optima Classical Academy students. Now that will reach across the nation a lot sooner than our brick-and-mortar schools will.

Ginny Gentles:

Erika, that’s exciting. I didn’t know that that was part of your vision and I’m thrilled that we’re able to share that plan with the IWF listeners. The Independent Women’s Forum recently launched a kid’s first campaign that was designed to gather parents’ and teachers’ thoughts on school choice, and we’ve already received over 400 submissions, either people telling their school choice stories or saying that they still wish they had school choice in their community.

As we wrap up, are there words of encouragement that you would offer these parents who are hoping for school choice?

Erika Donalds:

Well, I think how we started in Florida was an advocacy at the state level, as you said, to make the laws more friendly for choices coming into the state. There are a couple of different things that are low-hanging fruit. Perhaps one of them is public school choice, to open up the zone lines within your community. If there’s room in another public school that you want your child to go to, why can’t you select that school? We’ve done that in Florida, and even that creates some competition among your zone schools, your district-run schools. So that’s one thing that could be advocated for.

The other thing is to try to start a school. If you are able, if you have any charter school laws, find a group of people that can come together as a team and put together a school. It is hard. It is a ton of work and it takes a lot of expertise, but those resources are out there. In every state that has some sort of charter school law or private school choice, there are lots of organizations out there that have the wherewithal to provide resources to families and to community teams to put these schools together.

I really feel like the only way to change the education system is to compete with them and to provide a free market for families to choose from. And in every state that we’re able to do that, we need a lot of soldiers on the ground to work together towards that end. So I would just encourage them to become advocates as much as possible, whether it’s at the state level or at their local district, to increase competition in any way possible.

Ginny Gentles:

Well, thank you so much, Erika, for being a leader in the School Choice Movement, and for sharing your story with us today and inspiring those of us listening to you to go and do more and change the culture of education and change the options that are available to students. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us today.

Erika Donalds:

Well, I’m thrilled to get the word out and hopefully inspire some other people that if I can do it as just an accidental expert in school choice and in charter schools simply because as a mom, I was fed up with not having the options I was looking for for my children, other people can do it. You can get involved. It is accessible. Don’t let the bureaucracy tell you that you’re not equipped because you can be equipped, and you can go to optimaed.org and contact me and I’ll be happy to plug the listeners in with the right organizations in their state.

Ginny Gentles:

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Erika.

So for those of you who are listening, we hope that you take away something new from today’s conversation. And if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, or like the podcast in general, we’d love if you could take a moment to leave us a rating or review on iTunes. This helps ensure our message reaches as many Americans as possible. Share this episode, and let your friends know that they can find more She Thinks episodes on their favorite podcast app. From all of us here at IWF, thanks for listening.