CAPRICE YOUNG NAMED CEO OF ICEF PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Diane Ravitch has resigned from numerous ed reform organizations including the Fordham Foundation, which replaced her with ed warrior Caprice Young.  Talk about an upgrade! 

 

Caprice just became the new CEO of ICEF – see press release below.  This is great news for ICEF and the thousands of kids in LA it serves – as well as for the charter movement overall, as ICEF has faced some big challenges recently:

 

ICEF Public Schools announced today that education leader, businesswoman and former Los Angeles Unified School Board President Caprice Young will assume the permanent position as CEO of ICEF Public Schools, a network of 15 high-performing public charter schools in South Los Angeles. ICEF's 15-member board of trustees unanimously appointed Young to lead the organization after serving in an interim role since September.

Young assumed the interim role at the request of founder and former CEO Mike Piscal, among others, who sought her business expertise in dealing with ICEF's financial challenges. Deferred payments by the state, deep cuts in per-pupil funding and an unusually difficult facilities challenge had a significant impact on its budget (ICEF pays the rent for 13 out of its 15 campuses out of its operating budget), and brought pressure on the organization's operations.

Young raised close to $3 million in philanthropic support to help ICEF meet its short-term financial challenges. She stabilized ICEF's finances by restructuring ICEF's facilities plan and consolidating a school site, streamlining the central office and facilitating a 20 percent budget cut by empowering each school site director to implement school-site reductions without hurting their academic programs. ICEF successfully made these cuts without compromising on its core offerings—academics, arts and athletics—key ingredients to ICEF's long time success.