Athlos Academies founders discuss charter schools

Anne Wallace Allen//August 26, 2013//

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Ryan Van Alfen, John Stellmon and Jason Kotter in the School Model Support offices, a shared space in the Hawkins Companies offices in downtown Boise. Photo by Patrick Sweeney

Ryan Van Alfen and Jason Kotter are the founders of the Charter School Fund, a Boise-based not-for-profit that is affiliated with the Hawkins Companies. The fund builds charter schools around the country.

President John Stellmon, a former senior vice president at Regence Blue Shield of Idaho, joined the Charter School Fund in April. Kotter is a real estate developer, and Van Alfen is a dentist who sold his practice in 2006 to start the fund.

The three have formed a pair of not-for-profits with two distinct missions. One is the Charter School Fund, which provides facility services to charter schools. The fund works with parents and other groups trying to start schools, and with existing charter schools seeking to expand.

The other not-for-profit is a company called School Model Support, which runs Athlos Academies, a curriculum program for charter schools that emphasizes good nutrition, exercise, and academics. Van Alfen and Kotter teamed up with several companies, including the California-based Velocity Sports Performance, to create the Athlos curriculum.

The Charter School Fund started building schools in 2008, and has now completed nearly 1 million square feet of building space, Van Alfen and Kotter said. The company has built 14 schools, with two more under construction, Stellmon said.

Idaho Business Review sat down with the three principals to learn more about the companies. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What led you to choose charter school financing?

Van Alfen: Charter schools can’t levy property tax. They only get per-pupil funding. We have a solution to the largest obstacle in bringing market-driven education to scale, which we feel strongly is the only way to transform education.

We like to challenge the status quo; it drives me crazy to see how this education topic has been demagogued to death. No, it’s not about the kids. It’s about unions protecting union members.

In the existing system, the impediment to achieving results is the fact that the industry is protected from threats. What we like about the charter movement is if you don’t make it, you can’t go back to the taxpayers and ask for more money; you go out of business. You view parents and students as customers.

We felt facilities were a great starting point. We felt if we could figure out the facilities, we could help this come to scale.

Charter schools can’t use public money for facilities. How do you help?

Van Alfen: Jason helped pioneer a financial model that worked. We develop a structure, lease it to the 501(c)(3) charter school until they stabilize with their enrollment financially, and then they buy it from us. Then we just roll that forward in not-for-profit fashion, into the next project.

We bring the equity; we personally guarantee the debt. Nobody is taking more risk on a project’s success than we are.

Why is the fund a not-for-profit?

Van Alfen: We consider ourselves a social venture. We measure success by the number of jobs created, the number of kids educated, and by how we’re impacting education.

You have built or are building schools in Minnesota, Texas, Utah and Arizona. Why not in Idaho?

Stellmon: We’ve ranked the states by opportunity and by costs in terms of regulation and construction. (Idaho’s per-pupil spending is second-lowest in the country.)

Van Alfen: Minnesota is the birthplace of charters, so we’re fairly well-accepted, and their per-pupil funding is at a level that makes sense for us.

Also, there are economies of scale. Idaho is a small market. Once you start getting to that 1,000-student range, that’s when you can deliver facilities on par with what the district provides. It can exceed what the district provides.

It kills us because our kids aren’t going to the schools we want them to go to. We would do a break-even project in Idaho if we could figure out how to do it, just from a social venture standpoint.

Where does Athlos fit into all this?

Van Alfen: In the course of underwriting schools in a lot of different states, we found there’s a whole other side to education that was not being addressed. Studies show that the primary indicators for success are not grade point average, but the measure of a student’s grit.

Jason and I started to do some reading, found some people doing some incredible work on the side of social and emotional learning, and we started to ask ourselves why is this work not being done?

We still want a rigorous academic program and all that, but we’re defining children by how they perform and the GPA they produce. We started looking at the different modalities and we landed on athletics because it’s broad in appeal. We reached out to a company called Velocity Sports Performance and decided to co-design a curriculum that would work in a school that’s athletically neutral. Most of our kids were not athletes; “Athlos” means a notable accomplishment or feat.

Kotter: Athlos is the business. It’s why we’re receiving the phone calls now from people saying, “We want an Athlos school.”

What is the education background you bring to the design of this curriculum?

Van Alfen: Eric Schmidt from Google would say, when they would ask why they contributed so much money to Salman Khan, of the Khan Academy – and Salman Khan’s not an educator – “Innovation never comes from the established institutions.”

What’s next?

Stellmon: We’re starting two Athlos Academies in Texas this fall. We are contracted to start five more to open in Texas next fall, and one in Minnesota. We have another six in the hopper for the 2014-15 school year, all of which will be Athlos schools.

Athlos helps charter schools with buildings and classwork

By Brad Iverson-Long

The Charter School Fund has financed construction for more than a dozen charter schools outside Idaho, and its new president is hoping to ramp up its activity. The Boise-based not-for-profit is now tying its school buildings to Athlos Academies, an education model that includes athletics and character-based education that can link up with any charter school operator’s curriculum.

John Stellmon, president of Athlos, said he joined in April to help scale operations so that six to eight schools using Athlos’ model can open up every school year. The 75,000-square-foot to 85,000-square-foot buildings have at their center a full-sized gymnasium and indoor, 35-yard, artificial turf field. None of the schools have been built in Idaho, Stellmon said, because of its low per-pupil funding for schools and its small population. The schools need to be large to create the economies of scale that make the enterprise pay off.

Idaho schools rank above only Utah for per-pupil funding, and charters don’t receive any state-backed facilities funding.

“It doesn’t pencil very well,” Stellmon said. “The reimbursement is more in other states than it is in Idaho, and operators in other states are able to take that reimbursement and invest it in bricks and mortar.”

Athlos works with Boise’s Hawkins Companies on financing and construction and uses office space in Hawkins’ BoDo headquarters.

“The Hawkins Companies offers unique expertise around construction and development, and has the backroom infrastructure and support that we would otherwise have to build,” Stellmon said.

Athlos’ character-based teaching, emphasizing grit, social intelligence and leadership, was developed by one of its founders, Ryan Van Alfen. Athlos partnered with Velocity Sports Performance, a California-based athletic training company, for its grade-specific athletics lessons. Stellmon said those programs can then be combined with any charter’s academic curriculum. He pointed to a school opening up in Texas this year, International Leadership of Texas in Arlington, which will teach students English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, as one example of a school adding its own academic layer to the Athlos program.

Charter schools across the country often have flexibility in their curriculum, according to Michelle Clement Taylor, school choice coordinator for the Idaho State Department of Education. In Idaho, schools give students the state-required standardized tests every year and, starting this year, will now have their charters reviewed and renewed every four years by the school’s authorizer, which is either a local school district or the state’s charter school commission.

Clement Taylor said that, as with traditional public schools, the state offers flexibility on what is taught, including which books are used.

“As with any of the curriculum, the state approves textbooks, but we don’t approve curriculum. That’s a local control,” she said. Clement Taylor said many of Idaho’s 47 charter schools have formed because parents want a specific style or focus to a school, such as International Baccalaureate, the Harbor School method, or a focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“Sometimes it’s less about the curriculum and more about the school culture, wanting to provide a safe environment, or an environment that isn’t available at schools currently,” she said.

Updated Aug. 28 with additional information in shaded box.