Governance

The vision of Magnolia School of Excellence began early in 2012 with the development of the original founding board members of the Shreveport Charter Foundation: The original board included Ann Stokes, Dr. Melva Wallace, Zell Dudley, and Dr. Phillip Rozeman.

This group was driven by the goal of creating an excellent school of choice for all families in our community regardless of socioeconomic status or academic achievement.

The Shreveport Charter Foundation was established in 2012 and the board spoke with knowledgeable education leaders across the state and carried out a search for potential charter management organizations. After considering possibilities, the board chose Charter School USA - a large and very successful charter management organization in Florida and Louisiana as the management organization tasked with opening Magnolia School of Excellence.

The Foundation board worked with Charter School USA to develop an implementation plan and then sought Type I charter status from the Caddo Parish School Board. The CPSB voted in favor of becoming the chartering organization for a Type I Charter for Magnolia School of Excellence.

The Foundation then worked with Red Apple Development to obtain land and the financing for the construction of its first campus open on Clyde Fant Parkway in the summer of 2013.

As the Foundation board prepared for its first year of school, meetings were held around the community and a marketing campaign was developed for visual, print, and social media. This effort highlighted the opening of the first public choice school without attendance boundaries and the creation of the first new school building in Caddo Parish in 25 years.

The school held the first lottery for the initial K-6 school in 2013 and had 500 students coming from all the major zip codes in the parish. From the beginning, the plan was to grow by one grade per year until the completion of a PreK-12 school.

Because of growth in enrollment and the increase of a new grade level every year, Magnolia Charter built its second campus and new school building on land contiguous with the first campus on Clyde Fant Parkway for the 2016-17 school year. The campus buildings were reconfigured with lower campus housing grade K-5 and upper campus housing grade 6-12 students. The annual enrollment per grade at Magnolia has remained stable since the school opening.

Magnolia School of Excellence had its first graduating class amid the pandemic of 2020 with a 100% graduation rate. In this graduation process, we renewed again our vision to fuel the dreams of the children and families at Magnolia.