The mission of the Josephine County Charter School is to prepare the child for successful and satisfying childhood and adulthood. The goals derived from this mission include the following:

• Economic:
  The student will gain the skills necessary to permit him to be self-supporting as an adult in a fast-changing economy in which technologies and trades become obsolete several times during a single lifetime.
• Social:
  The student will learn the social skills necessary to function effectively in adult society.
• Legal/Political:
• The student will be given an opportunity to learn the skills necessary to have a significant impact on the local, regional and national political landscape if he chooses to.
• The student will be given an opportunity to learn enough about the legal system that he will be able to negotiate it successfully.
• Self-Actualization:
• The student will be encouraged to explore and articulate his personal values, desires and goals, and to begin working toward them..
• The student will be given an opportunity and encouraged to explore a wide variety of vocations, cultural, recreational and other disciplines and activities so that he will be in a better position to ascertain which of them interests him.
• Health:
  The student will be given an opportunity to learn basic health habits, as they are presently understood, and the skills necessary to obtain detailed medical information for self-care when the need arises.

1. Parents are ultimately responsible for critical decisions affecting their children's education. Accordingly, the School must be sufficiently flexible in its approach to education that it can accommodate the great majority of the diverse values and opinions held by members of the community regarding alternative educational approaches and individualized goals.

2. For many children, time spent in a classroom may be irrelevant to, or even negatively correlated with, the achievement of the educational goals outlined above. It is, after all, measurable goal attaintment, not "being there" that counts. Conversely, some children can best achieve their educational goals in a traditional classroom environment, and should be afforded the opportunity to do so.
3. Knowledge of facts is of secondary importance in the educational process. "Facts" change. Our understanding of the fundamental "facts" about the natural universe (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, psychology, paleontology, agriculture, ecology, geography cosmology, etc.) has, historically, changed dramatically and frequently during the course of an average lifetime, and the frequency of these changes has been accelerating in recent years. What is far more important than facts are:
• The ability to think critically
• Distinguishing information from misinformation and disinformation.
• The ability to distinguish relevant from irrelevant facts.
• The ability to adapt quickly, easily, and effectively to a changing environment and changing facts.
• The ability to learn quickly.
• The ability to solve problems creatively.
• The ability to understand the relationships among facts (e.g., the correspondence between current events and historical events; the causal relationships among crime, the economy, and global politics, etc.)
4. Individuals are unique, and that uniqueness is to be respected and nourished.
• Each person has a unique learning style. Some learn more effectively through listening; others through reading, others through active participation, etc. Similarly, some people learn more effectively under externally imposed deadlines; others learn more effectively when they are self-directed. The School will actively seek to accommodate individual learning styles to ensure that each child receives the maximum benefit from the educational experience.
• Each person has a unique set of interests and abilities. Some are naturally more interested and capable in the physical sciences, others the social sciences, others in agriculture, others in the performing arts, etc. The School will help the child explore, identify and realize his full potential in these areas.
5. Respect for self and others is essential to individual fulfillment and a civilized society.
• The School recognizes that true respect must be continually earned and re-earned, and will both directly and indirectly foster "respectable" behavior on the part of all of its participants.
• The School will require that all its participants-- students, staff and parents-- treat each other with respect.
6. Quality life is a scarce and precious commodity. The School recognizes the tension between the need to prepare the child for a fulfilling and satisfying life as an adult and the importance of its being a key element in a satisfying, quality childhood.
7. All participants in the School -- staff, students and parents -- are equal partners, albeit with varying roles and responsibilities, in determining and creating the educational experience to be provided by the School.
8. The quality and effectiveness of the educational experience is not correlated with the amount of money spent on it.
• We recognize, for example, that Washington DC, which has the highest per-student educational cost, also has the worst performance on standardized tests of any School district in the nation, and that, although per-student expenditures in this nation have risen more than 500%, measured in constant dollars, over the past forty years, performance on standardized tests during this same period has fallen by more than 10%.
• The School will seek to make effective use of available community resources and educational technology to achieve outstanding educational performance at a lower per-student cost than the school district average.
9. Cooperation is more effective than competition in promoting learning.
• Students will be encouraged to work together to cooperatively complete assigned projects and achieve assigned learning objectives.
• Grades will not be assigned to any project or examination by teachers. The strengths and weaknesses of any completed project will be discussed by the teacher with the responsible parents, performing group and individuals. An exception will be made in the case of parents who want quantitative information about their child's progress and performance. In these cases, such quantitative information will be provided, on an ad hoc basis, directly to the requesting parents and will not be made public.

1. Measuring educational achievement

Consistent with the educational goals outlined above, educational achievement will be assessed on a series of standardized tests that measure the ability to learn, to think critically, and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. At this writing, we have identified the following as a representative sample of the kinds of tests that will be administered.
• Miller Analogy Test
• Scholastic Aptitude Test
• Stanford-Binet IQ Test
• Etc.
2. Facilities

The School will potentially include multiple centralized facilities, each supporting the needs of a specific local community (e.g., Williams, Wolf Creek, etc.), and each comprising the following components:

• Classrooms suitable for traditional small-class-size lecture environments.
• Meeting rooms, to facilitate group processes and projects.
• Individual workstations, where students can perform solitary activities such as performing research using computers.
• A library for books, videos, computer programs, etc.
• One or more large multipurpose rooms that can support such events as:
• Large public gatherings
• Performing arts
• Indoor sports
• Outdoor multi-purpose recreational field
• Kitchen and eating facility
• Wood and machine shops
• Arts & crafts rooms
• Science laboratories
• Administrative offices
• Etc.
• In addition, the School will make use of existing facilities in the community that offer specialized resources not feasible for inclusion in the central facilities. These will include such things, all provided by members of the community, as:
• Horse training and riding stables.
• Plots of land for agricultural education.
• Landing fields for aircraft pilot training.
• Various local business establishments, in which students are participating in work-study programs.
• Etc.
3. Transportation

Because of the flexibility required of our Charter School, providing extended transportation services for children and parents will be an essential component of the program.
• The School will provide regularly-scheduled bus transportation throughout the community several times each day to take children to and from the central and auxiliary facilities.
• The School will provide limited, ad hoc transportation for staff and parents when required to achieve a specific educational purpose.
4. Teachers


• Teachers will be selected and retained principally on the basis of the following criteria:
• Expertise and experience in the subject matter being taught. Whenever feasible, only persons with substantial practical experience in a given field will be permitted to serve as a teacher in that field.
• Demonstrated effectiveness as educators, as measured by student evaluations, parent evaluations, and the performance of students on the aforementioned standard tests.
• Not all teaching will be performed at the aforementioned School and auxiliary facilities. Teachers will also provide individualized instruction via telephone, e-mail and/or the Internet, as appropriate and desirable.
• Not all teachers will be full-time employees or volunteers. Members of the community skilled and experienced in certain fields will serve as key resources in many areas. These teachers may serve either in person, at the School's facilities, or by phone or telecommunications, for such things as individualized tutoring and problem resolution.
5. Special Education Needs

The School will work in cooperation with the Three Rivers School District to address the needs of children with mental, emotional or physical handicaps.
6. Other Resources


• Extensive use will be made of computers and other information processing technology. Both the Internet, and a large library of educational material embedded in computer programs and associated data, will be used to support individualized, self-paced instruction.
• In recognition of the fact that computer and Internet usage is a critical component of the modern educational process, each student will be assigned a laptop computer, loaded with a school-standard set of software, and will be assigned a unique Internet account. It is expected that the student will make most use of these facilities from his home.