Plan For Struggling Middle School May Become A Model

Nashville’s Cameron Middle School is undergoing a major overhaul. It was one of about a dozen struggling Tennessee schools that needed to come up with an improvement plan or risk being taken over by the state. The changes being made at Cameron could pop up in other districts.

Over the next four years, Cameron will be turning into a charter school. The same group that runs Nashville’s LEAD Academy will run Cameron.

This change isn’t by choice.

In the state’s Race to the Top application it identified 13 failing schools that would become part of an achievement school district or ASD, but the state hasn’t given a clear picture of what that means for these schools.

Jeremy Kane is chief officer of LEAD and says what’s happening at Cameron may end up being a blueprint for other schools.

“That still to be determined. It really is one of those things that the ASD was a great idea on paper now it’s really that time where we have to translate it.”

Race to the Top funds will pay for professional development classes for Cameron’s teachers. The middle school will transform into a charter school one grade each year.