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Two high achieving Harvard grads, one a former professional athlete, the other a retired top-level GE executive, have shifted their careers in an unusual way.
Instead of the basketball court or the boardroom, the duo, Neil Phillips and Louis Parker, have entered the complex and sometimes trying world of charter schools. Plus, they've zeroed in on a part of Bradenton known more for gangs, crime and poverty than business or academic success.
Yet in launching an all-boys charter school there, Visible Men Academy, the goal is to change the failing dynamic for young minorities, says Phillips, who played basketball in Australia after college. A native of Jamaica who grew up mostly in the Washington, D.C., area, Phillips also played on the Jamaican National basketball team.
“We looked at the crisis surrounding black boys and black men,” says Phillips, “and it was clear that only one side of the story, the strife, the struggles and the failure, was being told.”
Phillips and Parker, who retired from GE in 2005, are joined in the startup venture with Phillips' wife, Shannon Rohrer-Phillips, who has a background in social work and education. Cindy Cavallaro Day, a former business manager for Pfizer and a volunteer in Sarasota County schools, is the fourth member of the Visible Men Academy founders' team.
The school is scheduled to open in August. For at least the first year it will enroll students in kindergarten, first or second grade, with the hopes to eventually expand to other grades. The school is open to any male students in Manatee County, though the founders target low-income neighborhoods. “The plight of black boys in this country today is very bleak,” says Parker. “This is a humanitarian crisis we want to address.”
The school will attempt to do that through several educational components, from emphasizing male role models to using weekly, monthly and quarterly assessments for students and teachers.
The strategy, further, has a time component. The school day at Visible Men Academy will be 8.5 hours, instead of the traditional seven hours, and the academic calendar will last 205 days, instead of 180, and it will include Saturday instruction. Those additions will lead to 32% more classroom time.
The school will lease space from the Community Church of God on 63rd Avenue East, though Visible Men Academy has no religious affiliation. Phillips says the school has been working on several campus improvements, including updated classrooms, fencing and a new playground.
'Big challenge'
Although the overall mission is laudable, Parker, one of the 40 highest-ranking GE executives at the peak of his business career, nonetheless says a charter school startup has been a Herculean task. In fact, Parker says running a $1.8 billion division at GE with $340 million in profits and 6,400 employees that operated in 35 countries was a cinch in comparison.
“This is the top business challenge I've ever had,” says Parker. “It's fulfilling, but it's tough. The big challenge being a startup is we don't have a track record. It's all about feet on the street and doing a lot of selling and convincing.”
A charter school, defined by the Florida Department of Education, is a tuition-free public school that works through an agreement, or charter, with the county school board. A charter school has its own board, but the county school board has official oversight. Charter schools pay an administration fee to the local district.
A charter school's budget, from payroll to facilities to insurance, generally comes from three sources: the Florida Education Finance Program, which provides money based on full-time student enrollment for all public schools; federal grants; and foundations and charity-based organizations. The Visible Men Academy founders have also put what Phillips calls a “substantial” amount of their own money into the school.
Even so, the founders realize the No. 1 reason charter schools struggle and sometime fail, not unlike new businesses, is lack of capital. “We are continually thinking about how we have to get the funds to execute the programs we want to execute,” Phillips says. “That's a constant challenge, and likely always will be.”
There are several other charter school hurdles, past financing. Finding teachers and administrators is a big one, says Adam Miller, the education department's charter schools director. And school board approval isn't a given. “There are real significant challenges to a charter school,” says Miller. “The regulatory framework is complex.”
Yet the difficulty embedded in building a successful and sustainable charter school in Florida hasn't stopped people from trying. “We've seen a big increase in the last few years,” Miller says.
Indeed, there were 579 charter schools in operation statewide in the 2012-2013 academic year. That's up from five in 1996, when the state first passed a charter law, according to education department data. The total number of Florida charter schools is up 26% since the 2010-2011 school year, when there were 459.
Charter schools can serve a number of specific needs, from just boys or just girls to pre-college to certain curriculums or at-risk students. Sometimes a standard public school applies to become a charter school, which is currently happening with Rowlett Magnet Elementary School in Manatee County.
Distinguished career
Parker and Phillips seem like solid candidates for the charter school challenge, at least based on their respective backgrounds.
Phillips is the principal of Visible Men Academy and most of his professional experience comes in education: He worked in administrative roles at Landon School for Boys in Bethesda, Md., and he was also interim head of the upper school at the Out-of-Door Academy in Sarasota.
But Phillips also mixes entrepreneurialism with philanthropy. He founded a year-round basketball-training program after his playing career, a company still in operation today. He later launched a nonprofit organization, Visible Men, when he and Rohrer-Phillips lived in the Washington, D.C., area and noticed a dearth of role models.
That's why the school is the next step, albeit a large one, in Phillips' ongoing mission to put black role models in front of young black boys. The nonprofit and the school are named after the 1952 book “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, in which a nameless black man searches for himself and for meaning in life in an oppressive society.
Phillips wants to lead boys to a different conclusion. “If you cultivate character traits like perseverance, determination and healthy families,” at a young age, says Phillips, “it will translate to the rest of their lives.”
Phillips met the perfect role model in 2011 in Parker, who runs operations and finance for Visible Men Academy. Parker grew up in a low-income neighborhood of Pittsburgh, with a hardworking father who could barely read and write. Parker and his two older siblings, however, all went to college.
Parker then went on to a distinguished business career. He worked for Morgan Stanley and in sales and marketing at IBM before GE. He also ran a division for payroll services firm Automatic Data Processing. At GE he ran the conglomerate's security products business, which was based in east Manatee County, and its insurance unit, based in Kansas.
At each career stop, but especially at GE, Parker says people would often say how his job must be a dream come true. That's why Parker put his passion behind Visible Men Academy at a stage of his life when most of his peers are on the golf course. He wants to help others dream big.
“Education has been a very important part of my life,” says Parker. “But I couldn't have dreamed this way as a kid because I didn't know it was available.”
From his gut
The cliche du jour for nonprofits, “run it like a business,” resonates deeply with Louis Parker, the head of operations and finance for Visible Men Academy.
That's because Parker, part of a four-person founding team at the new all-boys charter school in Bradenton, spent a decade of his high-level executive career at GE — the pinnacle of well-run businesses. Parker says from iconic Chairman and CEO Jack Welch on down the mission was to find efficiencies in every place possible. Says Parker: “We operated like every penny was your own.”
Parker spent 11 years at GE, where he ran an insurance unit and a security products division, among other executive roles. Parker says Welch was a top-notch motivator who had a superb ability to discover emerging leaders. “Jack was one of the best evaluators of talent I've ever seen in my lifetime,” says Parker. “He focused on having people who had the right leadership skills.”
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