"Each afternoon, school buses in a long line idle on a busy downtown street, awaiting dismissal at Boston Renaissance Charter Public School. Parents double-park on both sides of a nearby street, annoying rush-hour commuters."
Inside the 13-story school, students board elevators by the dozens over the course of nearly an hour, as 1,200 descend to the lobby.
This snail-paced dismissal should be history in the fall. Renaissance is moving, the latest in a wave of charter schools across the state investing millions of dollars in new facilities to better accommodate their educational needs. In many cases, charter schools are moving out of less-than-ideal classroom settings: storefronts, church basements, or community centers.
Their ascendancy to sparkling new locations represents an evolution from high-flying entrepreneurial start-ups to established institutions of success, the sort of Wall Street darlings of the education sector.
Renaissance, at the corner of Arlington and Stuart streets, is moving several neighborhoods away to Hyde Park, where a $39 million complex is under construction.
“Getting out of here will be a true blessing,’’ said Roger Harris, the Renaissance superintendent and chief executive officer who has nightmares about trying to evacuate students if there ever were a fire at the current location. “It’s a great building for a business, but for kids it has a number of drawbacks.’’