Culture Shock

It's lunchtime at Scuola Vita Nuova, and Gina Valente mingles among the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders as though she were hosting a cocktail party. Fewer than one hundred students are enrolled in the charter school, and as principal, Valente knows them all by name. Some even run up to hug Valente, who might be better known to the rest of Kansas City as the satiny voice of KXTR 1250's Adventures in Italy on Sunday mornings.

"I have happy children," Valente says.

There is a lot to be happy about at Scuola Vita Nuova. Instead of filing through a cafeteria line at lunchtime, for example, the students enter the room and look for a place setting at one of the cloth-covered tables. After they're seated, a kitchen staffer (the tattoo on her forearm peeks discreetly out from the bottom of her sleeve) comes by with a plate of food and serves each student individually.

Students at Scuola Vita Nuova can get three meals a day; today the chicken fried steak comes with homemade mashed potatoes and green beans, and dessert is warm apple pie. Teachers are required to eat with the children three times a week, using lunchtime to catch up with students and find out what's happening at home, how things are going with school or just whatever is on the children's minds.

When they're finished with their meals, the students bus their own tables, return to their seats and wait for one of the teachers to let their table line up for recess. Today it's raining outside, so the students go upstairs to a gym, where they play dodge ball and practice doing pyramids for the newly formed drill team before returning to classes for the afternoon.

Located in the lower level of the Bisceglia Italian Cultural Center at the corner of Wabash and Independence Avenue, just down the street from Garfield Elementary, Scuola Vita Nuova appears to be a sanctuary for grade-schoolers in the Northeast area -- and their parents, most of whom are fed up with the Kansas City, Missouri, School District. Kindergarten through fifth-grade classes are in session year-round, nine hours a day, so parents don't have to worry about their children while they're at work. In addition to its core curriculum -- basics such as math and reading -- its instructors teach classes on two foreign languages, computer technology, African and Native American studies, creative dance and yoga. Students and their families have been treated to operas, chamber music concerts and barbershop quartets. The kids have performed with opera divas and enjoyed classes with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. Classical music is piped into all of their classrooms.

Scuola isn't structured by traditional grade levels. Kindergartners are the only ones who stay together; the rest of the classes are broken up into groups of ten, with the makeup of each class based on students' aptitudes. A high-performing first-grader might be in a class with a below-average second-grader, thus avoiding the traditional middle-of-the-road approach that bores top students and frustrates the ones who need more help. Each group has a homeroom (and a special name, such as the Kangaroos or the Snow Leopards) but attends different classes throughout the day.

The facilities (the cultural center and a small two-story building next door) are anything but institutional: Schoolrooms are painted a soothing green; Native American masks decorate the walls, and the halls feature posters of famous artwork -- hung at the children's eye level.

"I was never really fond of school as a little girl, so having the opportunity to create a school, I wanted to create a school that I would want to go to," Valente says.

But a belly full of comfort food and the tranquilizing effects of classical music don't change the fact that the school has been through an inaugural year with enough conflict to rival the Kansas City school district's.

When the Missouri Legislature legalized charter schools during its 1998 session, many Kansas City parents were desperate for relief from the school district's problems. Charter school proponents argued that providing more educational choices would force the school district to improve if it wanted to compete for enrollment. While charter schools receive public money, they are independently governed and subject to less state oversight than public schools. The state sends money for the charters (roughly the same amount per student as public schools) to the district, which then passes it on to charter schools based on their previous year's enrollment. Each charter school must pay the district $1,000 per student per year for use of the district's property -- even if, like Scuola Vita Nuova, the school has its own facilities. Otherwise, the schools are free from the district's control.

A year and half after eighteen charters opened in Kansas City, more than 5,600 students are enrolled -- 16 percent of the district's total public school enrollment. Only two new schools have opened this year, but enrollment in charter schools is up 31 percent from last year. For many parents, anything is better than sending their kids to a district that seems as if it's never going to improve.