About CCAP

.On behalf of the Board of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals (CCAP), greetings and welcome to the CCAP website. CCAP (pronounced “SEA cap”) was founded in 2013 by a group of experienced charter school authorizing staff members from school districts and county offices of education around the state, seeking to strengthen charter school authorizing practices. CCAP’s founding led to the creation of the Charter Authorizers Regional Support Network (CARSNet), which provided authorizer supports in California under a grant until that grant concluded and CCAP took up the “baton.”

CCAP’s mission is to “advance quality public education for all students by providing professionals with the support, resources, and collective voice necessary to foster high-performing, fiscally sound, autonomous, and accountable charter schools that strengthen California’s public education system as a whole.”

We invite you to peruse our website, review our free resources, and read about some of our latest groundbreaking work. CCAP also has collaborated with the California Department of Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education — and soon the Los Angeles County Office of Education and the San Diego Unified School District — in implementing the Charter Authorizer Support Initiative (CASI), supported by the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), to expand and strengthen support for charter school authorizing through training and networking, with a special focus on small and/or rural authorizers. CASI’s work also advances the objectives of Charter Authorizing 2.0 (CA2.), CCAP’s vision for advancing equity and access through quality authorizing.

CCAP partners with the Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers (CACSA), the Florida Association of Charter School Authorizers (FACSA), and more recently the Wisconsin Resource Center for Charter Schools (WRCCS) under a collaborative organization, the National Network for District Authorizing (NN4DA), to support multiple state-level initiatives that strengthen the charter school authorizing practices of school districts. NN4DA is the next generation of our previous collaboration with CACSA and FACSA, known as the Tri-State Alliance for Strengthening District-Led Charter School Authorizing, which also was funded through a federal CSP grant.

CCAP is proud of its strategic partnership with our friends at the Small School Districts’ Association (SSDA). Thanks in part to the generous support of the U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program and the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, all SSDA members automatically are members of CCAP with no membership dues and are entitled to all our services and resources.

Other CCAP efforts have included developing toolkits for authorizers, including with the processes of reviewing charter petitions, preparing annual reports on charter school performance, planning charter renewals. CCAP also has issued a report of recommendations and ongoing collaborative efforts on preventing fraud in charter schools and the larger public education system and currently is conducting a study on core authorizing practices and the resource allocations needed to implement them consistently. In addition, for local authorizers who need more than resources, information, networking, and training but more direct supports, even of a transitional nature, CCAP is able to provide consulting services.

CCAP is continually adding new resources, news items, and information to our website, so please visit regularly. Charter authorizing professionals interested in participating in CCAP’s work can visit the membership page for details. Join CCAP’s mailing list to receive free periodic e-alerts and quarterly newsletter.

Who We Are