Chula Vista charter school getting high marks for efforts

Chula Vista charter school getting high marks for efforts
By Ashly McGlone
SDUT
December 30, 2010

The Chula Vista Learning Community Charter School, where students sporting uniforms learn about English diphthongs and the nuances of Spanish, could be easily mistaken for a pricey private campus.

The 12-year-old school has risen from the black sheep of the Chula Vista Elementary School District to a model education system and is ranked among the district’s top 10 in student achievement, according to Principal Jorge Ramirez.

The school has raised its Academic Performance Index nearly 200 points from 680 in 2005 to 878 in 2010, exiting the federally sanctioned Program Improvement status in 2008 and evading the revocation of its charter.

“We were working hard, but we weren’t working smart. Now I can say we are working smart and hard,” Ramirez said.

The 800-student campus is the only school in the Chula Vista Elementary School District that offers a dual-language immersion program where preschoolers through eighth-graders spend half of their day in English-only courses and the other half in Spanish-only courses...