Global Village Charter Collaborative
Global Village Charter Collaborative
The Global Village Charter Collaborative (GVCC) is a public, nonprofit organization, authorized under Colorado statute. It's purpose is to provide centralized services for member schools, ensure educational program fidelity, and support the network’s mission and vision.
- GVCC is similar to a school district in that it is nonprofit and provides centralized administrative support services based on the needs of individual schools.
- The GVCC is more collaborative than a school district in that each individual academy has a local site Board that manages its own budget, staff, and operations. Local boards also have three voting members on the GVCC Board.
- The GVCC is also unique in that as it replicates the Global Village Educational model, creating new Academies, it becomes the sole nonprofit corporate member of each new academy.
- The GVCC is also unique and unlike Charter School Management Organizations (CMOs) in that it does not manage its network schools. In fact, directors of each local school board also serve as a majority on the GVCC Board.
Global Village Academies are located in the following cities in Colorado:
- Aurora
- Colorado Springs
- Fort Collins
- Northglenn
- Douglas County (Parker school will open in 2015)
GVCC Mission
The mission of the GVCC is to establish, replicate, and support its Global Village Academies, which are currently K-8 schools, but there are active discussions about adding high schools. Through its mission, students are supported so that they will achieve high levels of linguistic proficiency in English and a second world language, global competency, and academic excellence.
Relationship Between GVCC and the GVA's
Global Village Charter Collaborative (GVCC) provides regional operational and educational support services for Colorado’s Global Village Academies, which are the nation’s fastest growing world language immersion schools offering English and three world languages.
GVCC provides economies of scale, both operationally and academically, in areas that would prove very difficult to fully develop for international world language immersion programs in an individual school.
- The Global Village educational program is nationally recognized as a leader in P-16 world language immersion.
- Due to national critical language initiatives and community interest, programs in Mandarin Chinese, French, Spanish, German, and Russian are currently available and will continue to grow.
GVCC Support Programs
The GVCC develops, implements, and sustains efficient centralized services for its member public schools. These include:
- All Human Resource Services
- All Staff Recruiting Management Services
- Marketing and Media Advertising Services
- All Website and Online Communication Services
- Legal Services Provided by Legal Counsel
- Facilities and Site Support
- Facilities Financing Coordination
- All Technology Infrastructure Management
- Procurement Services for Curriculum and Capital Items
- Curriculum and Materials Development
- All Financial Management
- Payroll Services
- Insurance and Benefits Administration
- Professional Development
- Network Policy Development
- Local Governing Board Support
- Compliance Support
- Academic and instructional support
- Data and Assessment Evaluation
- Administrator Academic and Operational Mentoring
- Grant Writing and Administration
- State and National Networking
- Induction and Alternative Teacher Licensing programs
- New school start-up support
While the majority of GVCC funding comes from its member schools sharing the costs, during the past year the GVCC was able to lower its member school shared costs by more than $200,000 through revenues received from grants, donations, the GVI Preschool network, and new school startup fees.
Shared Costs
As a public charter school, each Global Village Academy receives an average of $6,700 per pupil in state funds. - The costs for GVCC services are shared by each of the schools based on a percentage of their respective general fund revenues. The GVCC Board, which includes voting members from each local school’s Board, has currently established the cost sharing amount ranging from 7 to 8%
- Similarly sized Colorado school districts in 2013 paid an average of 16.2% or more for comparable central administrative services. (Source: CDE financial reports for school districts with total enrollment of 2,400 to 3,200 students)
GVCC International Partners Development
The GVCC has relationships with:
- The Han Ban
- The National Chinese Department of Education
- The Embassy of Spain's Cervantes Institute
- The French Ministry of Education
These partnerships are essential for international teacher recruitment along with managing the required immigration processes.
GVCC Curriculum Development
Another example of the benefits of GVCC is curriculum development, which requires the blending of content standards and objectives with world language standards and objectives, including an integrated scope and sequences, language framework, and units that incorporate all the elements needed for both content and language instruction. Standards-based core content must be aligned with K-8 language objectives for each of the target languages taught, including English Language Development.
The development of a comprehensive, immersion curricula is daunting, for one school. GVCC is involved in several curricular development consortiums including a Chinese literacy consortium, sponsored by Utah Department of Education, and the Russian curricular consortium, sponsored by Portland School Districts. The Global Village Collaborative is a recognized national leader in developing quality public immersion school curriculum materials, and has been asked to present at ACTFL, the National Chinese Conference, the East Normal University in Shanghai, the Portland State University Flagship, at University of Colorado.
GVCC & Grant Funding
GVCC has been very successful in attracting grant funding. Grant funding for GVA schools has included:
- A five year $1.4 million U.S. Department of Education grant.
- A $900,000 grant through the National Security Agencies, STARTALK program for critical languages.
- $1.2 million in Colorado Department of Education start up grants.
- $500,000 from the Walton Family Foundation;
- $50,000 from the Asia Society as one of the first Confucius Classrooms in the United States.
- GVA campuses have also issued $8.3 million in bonds to build the first 32,000 square foot phase one of the Aurora campus and a $1.58 million dollar loan to renovate the GVA campus in Northglenn.
GVCC assists with obtaining financing for Global Village Academy facilities and helps to guide the architectural, legal, planning, and construction process for these facilities.