About Us
CCAP is comprised of a group of educational leaders with a vision to provide authentic support and resources to those who do the critical work of professional charter school authorizing in California.
The California Charter Authorizing Professionals (CCAP, pronounced “SEA cap”) is a nonprofit association founded in 2013 by a group of experienced charter school authorizing staff members from school districts and county offices of education around California, who came together to strengthen charter school authorizing practices.
Mission: to advance quality public education for all students by providing professionals with the support, resources, and collective voice necessary to foster high-performing, fiscally sound, autonomous, and accountable charter schools.
Staff
Tom Hutton, Executive Director
Tom Hutton became CCAP’s executive director in August of 2020. His professional background includes work on behalf of school districts, authorizers, and charter schools.
Tom is a former school attorney who served in-house with the National School Boards Association and its Council of School Attorneys and later in private practice in Seattle. As a law student, he was a co-founder of Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School, a law-themed high school in the District of Columbia. More recently, Tom served as the first executive director of the Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission, a statewide authorizing agency, and then as an independent consultant to charter authorizers nationally.
Tom also has served on the governing board of Wai‘alae Elementary Public Charter School in Honolulu and has been both a participant and a coach in the Leadership Program of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA).
During his career, Tom has been a frequent speaker, writer, and news media source, as well as a sometime adjunct professor of education law, most recently at Indiana University Bloomington. Additionally, he recently served for almost four years as the Interim Executive Director of the Education Law Association, a professional association of professors, attorneys, administrators, students, teachers, and others interested in the intersection of the law with all sectors and levels of our education system.
Tom was educated in public schools in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Colorado. He attended Connecticut College, holds a graduate certificate in public administration from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and earned his J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.
Tom is also a founding member of the NN4DA Governing Council.
Our Meetings
Resources
CCAP Resource Library
CCAP develops and disseminates toolkits to help school districts and county offices of education with often complicated charter school authorizing processes so that they do not have to create as many policies and practices from scratch. CCAP’s Resource Library includes these and other tools, from across California and beyond.
CCAP is continually adding new resources, news items, and information to its website and provides periodic email alerts and newsletters with important information for authorizers, other education officials and professionals, and policymakers.
Our Latest Project
CCAP Partners in California
California collaborates with a wide range of organizations to support and strengthen charter authorizing, including the following groups.
