Ednovate’s CEO, Oliver Sicat, celebrates Ednovate’s accomplishments and share the 2023 Annual Report.

Ednovate Charter Schools CEO, Oliver Sicat, shares his reflections on the first month of the 23-24 school year.

Ednovate, a network of innovative public charter schools, has partnered again with the University of Southern California (USC) Rossier School of Education to establish a groundbreaking teacher training residency program. This program, which will be called the USC Ednovate Teaching Fellows program, is supported in part by a $250,000 grant from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

1 Year of 100% Virtual Learning. Still 95% attendance and 85% of students passing all classes. What stuck and what we changed. We’ve learned a lot over the last 12 months, and I want to share some of the practices that stuck and key adjustments that we made.

The health and safety of our community come first, and after listening to you and hundreds of our parents, students and staff, through surveys, focus groups, and conversations, along with the rising public health concerns in Southern California, we have decided all Ednovate schools will be 100% virtual for Quarter 1 of the upcoming school year (August 4th–October 9th).

With COVID-19 taking so many elements of our daily lives virtual, we know it’s more important than ever that our community is able to access resources quickly and easily. Whether you’re a student, family member, teacher, or team member who’s already a part of the Ednovate community, or you’re considering enrolling in a school or joining our team, we hope this new website will be a valuable resource.

Like educators around the globe, Team Ednovate has spent the past week working on our plan to go completely virtual, as we help our communities in the best way we can to get our current public-health crisis. After a lot of quick, hard work by the team and our fantastic group of innovative educators, we went virtual starting on Monday, March 16. And I wanted to share some of the learnings we’ve had and the adjustments we are making.  

Over the last few months, I’ve loved sharing some of the great elements of Ednovate with you.  Today, it is my honor to share why I have chosen to do this work for the last 20 years. 

At the end of an All Ednovate Staff meeting last October, one of our teachers casually introduced and brought up four students up to the stage. With little urgency or fanfare, one plugged his electric guitar into his amp, another sat behind a drum set, and one of the students grabbed her mic in one hand while cooly pulling her hair back with the other hand. Our teacher announced that this was the first time that this group, Los Leones, was going to perform for an audience. Their debut performance was going to be in front of over 220 people! What an opening gig.