It's new mascot will be the cardinal - a throwback to its nickname before the Rebel was installed in the late 1950s. Going forward, the school will be called Kaleidoscope Academy at the Roosevelt campus. However, the new school is not abandoning the Roosevelt name, nor its ties to Roosevelt's past. 'This is really just the last formal step to being one building,' Brant said. The schools have the same parent booster club. They implemented the Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports system as a building. Teachers in the two schools collaborate every day. Kaleidoscope's enrollment has been growing steadily in recent years, while Roosevelt's has been shrinking. When the 2016-17 academic year begins in the fall, Brant said the school will have more than 620 students - the most to study at Roosevelt since freshmen left the district's middle schools two decades ago. Kaleidoscope Academy opened nine years ago with about 130 students. Ninth-graders left the city's middle schools 71 years later when Appleton North High School opened. Roosevelt opened to seventh, eighth and ninth grade students in 1925. As you can tell, there are quite a few charter schools in this area and that gives parents so many options,' she said. 'It's always been an open, accepting place for charters.

The school board approved the idea last year, which speaks to the district's long history of support for charter schools, said Nancy Coonen, president of Kaleidoscope's governance board. It's the first charter school in Appleton to merge with its host school. Kaleidoscope falls into the second camp - it has been housed at Roosevelt since it opened in 2007-08. Some of Appleton's charter schools, such as Classical School, Appleton Bilingual School and Appleton Public Montessori, have their own buildings. Others share space with traditional schools - Fox River Academy students study at Jefferson Elementary or Wilson Middle School, depending on what grade they're in, and students at Tesla Engineering Charter School take courses at Appleton East High School, for example. But the curriculum, emphasis and teaching style varies from school to school based on a contract, or 'charter,' between the operators and the sponsoring school board. Students take the same state tests required of all public school students. Like the rest of the district's schools, charter schools are tuition-free. That's a far cry from 1996, when the district launched its first charter school, Central High School. Kaleidoscope Academy alone will count an enrollment of more than 620 students come August. Nearly 3,000 of the district's 15,128 students were enrolled in charter school programming during the 2015-16 school year, said Kimm Smith, assistant to the superintendent. The change also speaks to the growth of charter schools within the Appleton Area School District, with nearly 20 percent of the district's students now enrolled in one of its 15 public charter schools. 'It's exciting from the standpoint that more opportunities are available for kids in terms of the choices that Kaleidoscope offers,' said Al Brant, principal of Roosevelt and Kaleidoscope. Starting next school year, Kaleidoscope Academy, the inquiry project-based charter school that has shared space with Roosevelt in recent years, will have the building to itself. When the 2015-16 school year draws to a close, so will Roosevelt's tenure as a traditional seventh and eighth grade middle school. APPLETON - A chapter in the 91-year history of Roosevelt Middle School ends Friday.

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