Growing up in Orange County, Preston Davis bounced between three elementary schools in quick succession as his parents moved around. He struggled to find his footing.
So when Davis learned that Orange Center Elementary School, where he sends his three kids, could add middle school grades, he was thrilled. His children love the Orlando school where teachers feel “like an extension” of family, and he’d be delighted if they could stay through eighth grade, he said.
Orange Center parents will be asked to vote in January on the school’s proposed expansion, which would involve a conversion to a charter school in tandem with a nonprofit.
The school sits in a mostly low-income west Orlando neighborhood, one where the nonprofit Lift Orlando is already working to provide health and social services and improve housing. The charter school’s goal is to provide more support to disadvantaged students than a traditional public school can provide.
Davis will vote “yes,” grateful the school already stepped up for his family by providing food and Christmas gifts when they were struggling a few years ago.
“There isn’t a single staff person at that school that doesn’t know my kids’ names, and my kids truly feel loved and recognized,” Davis said.
Orange County Public Schools and Lift Orlando have jointly proposed to convert Orange Center into a charter school. That means the school would be run, in effect, by the non-profit, which like other charter operators would be freed from some state rules, rather than OCPS but still be a public institution. The goal would be to add middle grades and become a K-8 school focused on science, technology, math and engineering.
To do that, more than 50% of the parents with currently enrolled students must approve the plans. If they do, the expansion would start in 2027, with Orange Center eventually enrolling about 300 more students on a campus that now has about 440.
Preston Davis, top, and his kids (from left): Anastasia, Cassius, and Leonardo are pictured at Orange Center Elementary School in Orlando on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel)
Principal Erin Albert, known for memorizing the names of all the school’s students, supports the plan and is urging parents to approve it. Most seem excited about it, she added. Albert plans to stay on if the school becomes a charter.
Continuity for young students is important, Albert said, and adding middle school grades to Orange Center would only strengthen the school’s ability to help children.
“Think about the impact we can make on a child when we’ve had them for eight, nine years. The impact and the relationships and the roots we can build with these families and these kids are only going to be that much stronger,” she said.
The partnership with Lift Orlando is a selling point.
“When you take a resource center, a plug like Lift Orlando, and you pair them with an education powerhouse like OCPS, what could go wrong? The opportunities are going to be endless for both their kids and their families and the future of the neighborhood,” Albert said.
Lift Orlando works in the historically Black neighborhoods between Orange Blossom Trail and John Young Parkway, Colonial Drive and Gore Street, including Lake Lorna Doone, Rock Lake and Lake Sunset. As part of its school plan, it would help launch an independent, parent-led nonprofit called Neighborhood Schools Initiative, Inc. to run the charter school.
Since 2013, Lift Orlando has raised more than $100 million to convert decrepit and underutilized properties into an early learning center and a Boys & Girls Club as well as housing and healthcare facilities. It currently helps pay for teacher professional development and a pre-kindergarten program at Orange Center.
Unlike most charter schools, which operate independently on their own campuses, Lift Orlando would be a partner, not a competitor, with the school district, said Mark Shamley, the agency’s vice president of community impact.
“Eighty percent of a child’s life is spent outside of a classroom, and if you marry these two organizations together to approach it holistically, you can be really successful on getting really outstanding and sustainable results over time,” he said.
The school could also be a “road map” for similar partnerships in other districts, he added.
Orange Center Elementary School in Orlando is pictured on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel)
Jacqueleen Bido doesn’t live in Orange Center’s attendance zone, but drives her two youngest children to the school every day.
She likes the hands-on experiences that her kids are eager to talk about every day after school, such as the time one daughter’s class made s’mores with a solar-powered oven constructed from a pizza box and aluminum foil.
“It’s just opening a world for her that doesn’t have limitations,” she said.
Bido worked for charter schools in New Jersey before moving to Central Florida, and worked for OCPS as a parent and family engagement administrator from 2015 to 2018. To her, the partnership offers the best from both charter and public schools.
“I know the resources that come with charter schools — very corporate supported. But I also know the consistency that public schools offer the community, like growing up in a community school, really knowing your neighbors, knowing that when you walk around the neighborhood, it’s not foreign to you,” she said.
But Bido, who is serving as a parent advisor to Lift Orlando, said she does wonder if all the teachers will want to remain as they would become employees of the charter school, not OCPS. That means they could lose protections that come from being represented by a teachers union.
Clinton McCracken, president of the local teachers union, said teachers at the new Orange Center charter school would be considered “on a leave of absence” for a year and could return to district schools if they didn’t like the changes. He said the district has said charter school teachers might have union representation, though that is not certain.
Albert said teachers are mostly excited about the plans. The school’s goal is to retain all of the school’s current teachers, she said.
Anjeanette Braden, whose daughter is a fourth grader at Orange Center, said when she first heard about the charter school plans she worried how the conversion would impact her daughter’s academic progress and if she would be on track when she went to high school.
She was relieved to learn the school would continue to teach to state standards, meaning credits and classes would carry over to the district’s other public schools.
And Braden said she would be thrilled for her daughter to stay at Orange Center through middle school. That would reduce her daughter’s anxiety about going to middle school, keep her with the same group of friends for three more years and let her continue to get the extra help the school provides, she said.
“I love that they pay attention to each child individually, as well as part of a team. They don’t let them feel left out because they’re not quite there yet, but they also help them get to where they need to be at the same time,” Braden said.