Welcome from Dave Patterson, CCAP Board President, and Tom Hutton, CCAP Executive Director

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 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.”

We invite you to peruse our website, review our free resources, and read about some of our latest groundbreaking work. CCAP also collaborates with the California Department of Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education in implementing the Charter Authorizer Support Initiative (CASI), a three-year federal Charter Schools Program subgrant to expand and strengthen support for charter school authorizing through training and networking, with a special focus on small and/or rural authorizers. CASI also reinforces the objectives of Charter Authorizing 2.0 (CA2.), CCAP’s vision for advancing equity and access through quality authorizing.

CCAP has also partnered with the Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers (CACSA), and the Florida Association of Charter School Authorizers (FACSA), to launch the National Network for District Authorizing (NN4DA), to support 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, which was funded through a federal National Charter School Dissemination Grant. You can read more about this important grant here.

We have also extended our strategic partnership with our friends at the Small School Districts’ Association (SSDA). Thanks 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 and are entitled to all our services and resources.

Other ongoing efforts include developing toolkits to help authorizers through the often complicated processes of reviewing charter petitions and annual reports, and creating an “Action Plan to Strengthen Authorizing Practices to Support English Learners.”

We are 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.

Thank you for visiting. We look forward to working with you.

Dave Patterson, Co-founder and Board President, and Tom Hutton, Executive Director