For Norma Meadows of Aubrey, finding a school where she was comfortable sending her four children has been a challenge.

After situations in both public and private schools where she said her children may have felt academically inferior to peers, home-schooling seemed for a while to be her only option.

DRC/Barron Ludlum

Dr. Nick Farley will be the superintendent of the new public charter school at 5411 U.S. Highway 377 in Aubrey. The Education Center’s Aubrey campus will be its fifth location in Denton County.

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That changed this summer after she received a brochure from the Education Center, a new school opening near Aubrey that offers students in kindergarten through 12th grade an education focused on individual learning. The school allows students to receive one-on-one attention in areas such as math, language arts and reading at their own pace.

“I’m so proud about it,” Meadows said, adding that the school will let her children think for themselves and concentrate on schoolwork without any feeling of inferiority. “I think it’s going to be a good thing for us.”

Starting Aug. 25, the free public charter school’s Aubrey campus will open its doors to an estimated 170 children. The school, located on U.S. Highway 377, is the latest of the Education Center’s five campuses in Denton County. The Denton campus, on Country Club Road, opened in August 2007. Other campuses in the county are in Little Elm, Lewisville and The Colony.

The school also has a campus in Temple.

Denton resident Arvind Singh also said the school seemed to be the perfect fit for her 8-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter.

Moving to the United States about six years ago from India and trying to fit in to the traditional public school setting was a challenge for her children, she said. For her daughter, Ehemehak, also known as May, receiving her education in a public school setting started off strong. Academically, she  “was at a very good level,” her mother said.

But constant pressure to dress a certain way or to fit in with others quickly took a toll on her academic efforts, Singh said.

“With a child coming from India at 8 and a half, there’s a lot of emotional appeal, and I couldn’t help her,” Singh said. “She was going down.”

After exhausting every avenue to help her child, she said she now believes enrolling her daughter at the Education Center was the best decision.

One reason many students lose interest in school is because they feel they must compete with others, she said. The Education Center, Singh said, gave her daughter a family atmosphere where she was supported as an equal.

“My daughter is more confident. She was a very quiet kid, and now she interacts,” Singh said. “She doesn’t feel lost there. Whatever she says, she feels it won’t be lost there.”

May Singh said the Education Center made her more optimistic about learning. She said she immediately receives help when she’s struggling in a content area, and she can speak with her teachers when facing a problem — something she said she rarely encountered while attending Denton public schools.

“At [public] school I was just trying to get out of school,” May said. “At the school I’m at now, even though it’s summer, I just wish they would open the doors now.”

Charter schools are a good option for some parents and students, said Denton school district Superintendent Ray Braswell.

He does not see charter schools as competition, he said, because the schools are serving specific types of needs.

A decision to send a child to a charter school is an individual one, Braswell said, and he supports that parent’s decision 100 percent.

The only problem, he said, is that he’s seen charter schools come and go, and that’s not good for the students, who end up losing an educational environment that worked for them.

Dr. Nick Farley, superintendent of the Education Center, said the schools opened in Denton County to meet the needs of parents who wanted individual attention for their children and curriculum that included character-building exercises.

The center’s classrooms have a student-to-teacher ratio no higher than 24 students per teacher, with an average class size of 18 to 19 pupils.

The center, which is a public charter school funded by the State Board of Education, educates students at no charge. Since its inception in 2000, the center has grown to six campuses serving 1,050 students with the intent to assist students struggling in a content area or who have a desire to accelerate at a faster pace, Farley said.

He said he considered it a privilege to provide a free charter school for students who might have fallen through the cracks because of learning gaps.

“We have seen a number of students that would have been dropouts graduate and become successful,” Farley said. “We’ve seen some that have been able to accelerate and graduate early because of having an individualized program.”

Enrollment for the 2008-09 school year is still ongoing.

Staff writer Amy Dodd Thompson contributed to this report.

BRITNEY TABOR can be reached at 940-566-6876. Her e-mail address is btabor@dentonrc.com