The partnership of the city and Florida State University was officially consummated last week as families, faculty and dignitaries dedicated the namesake elementary school, the seventh and final addition to the city’s charter system.
Florida State President T.K. Wetherell flew from Tallahassee with eight other university officials to attend the Monday morning ceremony.
The event marked what FSU administrators have called the first collaboration in the country where a municipality and a top-rated university have come together to operate a charter school.
Wetherell “had only been in office two weeks when Pembroke Pines approached him about the collaboration,” Richard Kunkel, dean of FSU’s College of Education, told the audience. “They said to him, ‘We are going to build this school.'”
The city’s tenacity, Kunkel said, influenced FSU in March to issue the charter for the Pembroke Pines-Florida State University Charter Elementary School, at 601 SW 172nd Ave., a request the Broward School Board had rejected. Publicly funded, privately run charter schools are required by state law to have the sponsorship of either a school board or university.
The $7.8 million, 44,000-square-foot structure is now home to a capacity 600 kindergarten through fifth-graders, 31 staffers, 24 classroom aids, five college interns and nine students in the autistic center.
The center eventually will house 50 students with autism, according to Principal Lisa Libidinsky.
She introduced Wetherell’s city counterpart in the venture, Mayor Alex Fekete, as “a man whose vision and excellence has made this day possible.”
Fekete, who spearheaded the city’s charter system in 1997, recounted how Pembroke Pines opened its first elementary school on separate campuses in 1998 and added a school every year since.
Libidinsky, 32, was a product of that growth. She served as assistant principal for two years at the charter system’s west elementary campus before accepting the top post at the FSU site.
“I wanted to be a part of a committed type of school, and we have a true committed, community feeling here,” Libidinsky said.
That sentiment was expressed as the 250 members of the school chorus belted out the theme song of the day, Flying Without Wings, under the direction of music teacher Andre Daniel.
“My experience here has been amazingly wonderful. I see 600 kids every week who know me, smile at me and appreciate me,” Daniel said. “I receive as much as I give.”
The principal agreed.
“I’m so fortunate. I have a wonderful staff, great parents and magnificent support. I really, really enjoy being here every day.”
Libidinsky said that although all four elementary campuses will share the same curriculum and structure, innovative strategies for students, teachers and administrators will be tested at the FSU research, or lab, school before being disseminated.
Those opportunities include new course material, learning projects, interns and federal grants. Wetherell said the university sponsors another lab school in Tallahassee but views the charter system — which it hopes to eventually oversee entirely — as offering greater potential.
“This thing has become a great tool for us. We see it as becoming a model for rural school districts in North Florida, places where the whole district is the size of the Pembroke Pines system,” he said.
Wetherell told the audience, including all students and staff and about 75 well-wishers, that he considered the school an outgrowth of FSU’s main campus.
“We have 38,000 students in Tallahassee and another 20,000 exchange students on campuses around the world,” he said.
“And now we have 600 in Pembroke Pines.”
Two of those belong to school volunteer Kathy Doan. The Miramar resident said she attended the ceremony to show the appreciation she feels toward the school. Her children, Kimberly, 7, and Christopher, 6, were among the 11,000 wait-listed for the charter system’s computer-generated lottery until the FSU school began a separate enrollment method.
“I never had a number low enough to officially get accepted. I’m hoping that my other daughter [in eighth-grade] gets an opportunity like this,” Doan said. “Seeing the level of education they’re receiving and the way they’re always happy going to school — that’s what it’s all about.”
The lab school received permission from the state to screen its admissions on Broward-based demographics for ethnicity, economic background, academic ability and gender, according to registrar Betty Sigler.
That was the edge that dedication-spectator Cathi Rivera of Miramar said allowed her daughter to be accepted over the 1,200 other applicants.
“But I didn’t really know if I wanted to send her to a research school. I didn’t really know what that meant,” Rivera said.
Now that her daughter, Mollie, has been in first-grade for two months with a teacher, aide, intern and 24 classmates, Rivera said she thinks research school means “motivational environment.”
“They have their act together here,” Rivera said. “Their belief system helps kids excel. They have the vision.”
