NJ Education Report

Education Week  explains how KIPP’s TEAM Charter Schools in Newark financed the purchase of Newark’s 18th Avenue School (see my post here). The key, says Ed Week, was “tax credits” which are “reserved for buildings that are purchased by a for-profit company and are on the National Register of Historic Places.”

Ryan Hill, CEO of TEAM, explains that “it wasn’t like, ‘Do this and save money, or pay $30 million for renovations and buy less books,’ ” he said. “It was like, ‘Do this, or we don’t know what we’re going to do’ because it just wasn’t affordable and the building would have fallen down eventually without question.”

Hill adds, “[w]hat [historic tax credits do] is ultimately make a lot of facilities that exist already affordable that would not have been otherwise.”

Read the whole piece, especially if you need desensitization therapy after reading Bob Braun’s paranoid screed. (Confession: I now can only picture the man in a tin foil hat.)

The newly-refurbished building, historical features preserved, will open in Newark’s South Ward a year from September and serve 900 students, K-8th grade.