Hello Cornerstone Supporters!

We met with a representative from our authorizer on Friday and have an update and timeline to share with you.

Our application will be finalized with our authorizer and sent to the MN Department of Education by the end of October. We will be eligible for the federal grant for all three years, but we need to secure enough private funding and/or start up materials and services to secure opening in the next school year (fall 2011), as we will be unable to apply for the first round of the Charter School Start Up Grant until June. That means we will be doing a lot of fundraising, grant seeking, and inquiring about materials and services from various businesses (for example, asking Apple to donate computers to our school) over the next several months. We are continuing our plans and plan to start evaluating locations for our facilities later this fall.

The good news!!!

1. We are still on track to open our doors for the 2011-2012 school year!

2. It is looking very likely that we will have enough interest in the upper grades to open enrollment in K-6th grade.

The bump in the road...we have a lot of leg work to do in order to keep up this pace, but are confident we WILL make it happen. In order for this to happen we need help from many of YOU!!!

What you can do to help??

-Parents interested in forming the initial Parent Community Board should send your contact information to us as soon as possible. In the next week or so we will be scheduling a time for our first Parent Community Board meeting. (Our meetings typically are scheduled in the evening, so please enclose the best/worst days and times for you to meet.)

-If you have fundraising ideas/experience, or contacts with any businesses that would be willing/interested in donating any equipment, money, or services that we will need to get our school started please send us that information.

-Continue to spread the word of Cornerstone Preparatory Academy. We are continually adding to our enrollment list, we especially need names of K-2nd grade students (for application purposes).

We will be holding another information meeting in the next couple of weeks and will let you know when we have those dates!

Please contact us with any questions or comments!