Direct Education Scheduler

Damien and Ann Tillis’ second child will be ready for kindergarten next fall, and they want the right fit for her.

Their sixth-grade daughter attends Cold Springs School, one of Indianapolis Public Schools’ magnet schools, which focuses on environmental studies.

They were happy with her experience, but at Saturday’s IPS magnet fair at Tech High School, they started at the table for School 70, which has a performing arts theme.

“We think it may fit her personality better,” Ann Tillis said of her younger child. “She loves music and likes to be the center of attention.”

Specialty themes and enrollment that is not limited to a geographic area are what make magnet schools different from neighborhood schools. The programs generally are selective, requiring students to maintain good grades and good behavior or face possible expulsion.

Magnets also are an increasingly important strategy for IPS as it seeks to compete against new challenges from charter schools and vouchers, which offer parents the chance to use state dollars to defray tuition at private schools. But spreading the word about what IPS offers has been a challenge.

“In spite of all we’ve done communicating, our magnet programs still seem like a well-kept secret,” Superintendent Eugene White said. “We needed some occasion where people can get to see it, touch it and feel it.”

about a third of IPS schools — that offer a total of 26 magnet programs. White said he wants to aggressively add more magnets in the next few years.

“We didn’t know there were this many magnet schools,” said Damien Tillis, an accountant who attended IPS growing up. “It wasn’t like this when I was a child. It’s exciting.”

Two new magnet schools will come online in 2012. Both will be college-prep-oriented — Longfellow Middle School and Gambold High School. Longfellow will follow the AVID program. Gambold is being designed by the administrators who helped build the successful Center for Inquiry magnet schools and is intended as a high school destination for students at the city’s CFI, Montessori and gifted magnet schools.

Gambold piqued the interest of eighth-grader Corey Scholl and his mother, Jennifer Scholl, at Thursday’s magnet fair. Corey attends School 2, a CFI magnet school, and has his eye on Tech High School, where many of his friends plan to go. But he and his mother also are intrigued by the possibilities offered by a CFI-influenced high school at Gambold.

“It would be really cool for him to say he was in the first graduating class of a very successful school,” Jennifer Scholl said.

She was leery of sending Corey to IPS before she found CFI, and as high school approaches, she recalls her own experience as a bored IPS high school student. The fair, she said, helped them get a better sense of their options.

“I don’t want him to have a negative IPS high school experience like I did,” she said. “It gives you a real advantage to come here and see what’s out there.”