The Academy of Excellence emphasizes hands-on learning.
The Academy of Excellence emphasizes hands-on learning.
By SARAH WEBER
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- It's been three years since the old Roosevelt Elementary School on Rigby Street closed, but the school yard is once again noisy with kids playing touch football at recess.
The old building has been patched up and filled with pupils of the Youngstown Academy of Excellence, which quietly opened in September.
The academy is a charter school run though its parent company, Mosaic Inc., which has opened dozens of charter schools across the country since 1997. Mosaic sends scouts to cities they think need an alternative education to traditional public schools. Charter schools, like other public schools, are run with state funding on a per-child basis, but have less state regulation in terms of how the school is run. There are no tuition fees or entrance requirements.
Very typical
While charter schools can have many faces, from providing an education to special needs pupils to teaching gifted pupils who want to move faster than the local public school allows, Kamal Chatman, the chief administrative officer, said that the academy is a very typical elementary school with pupils of all academic capacities. He said the school is run with lots of parent involvement, uniforms are required and the academic bar is set high.
"We run it like a private school," Chatman said. "The curriculum is very college preparatory. Our goal and our expectation is that our kids go to college."
To give pupils a more thorough education, the school year as well as the school day is extended. School begins at 9 a.m. and lasts until 4:30 p.m. and pupils will begin school Aug. 14, with summer break starting in June.
The curriculum consists of 90 minutes of reading, one hour of math, one hour of science and 90 minutes of Paragon education. Paragon is an enriched social studies program that allows the pupils to experience history as they are learning it.
"The Paragon program fully immerses the children in the art, food and music of the time," Chatman said.
Aside from the core curriculum, pupils have Spanish, music, art and physical education classes. Chatman said there are three to four computers in each classroom and the school has ordered SMART Boards, which are used with a computer so teachers and pupils can interact with material projected onto the board, for next school year.
There has been much debate across the nation as to whether charter schools actually offer a better education than public schools.
"We're just an alternative choice," Chatman said. "We're not necessarily better, we're just an alternative. There are good public schools and there are bad public schools, just like there are good charter schools and there are bad charter schools."
Comparable scores
Despite promises of improved educational opportunity, when the test numbers come in, charter school pupils often score comparably to local public school pupils. Chatman said that charter schools may not excel on paper because pupils who transfer there are starting out behind in their studies.
"These are not special education students, these are students who have been failed by the public school system," Chatman said. While the academy has only been open one year, he said that he has seen pupils improve significantly but not catch up to their grade level academically.
"I believe in the idea of meeting children where they're at ... and pushing them to move beyond that," Chatman said.
Though the academy's curriculum is new, the building is not. Chatman said that there were some improvements made to the old Roosevelt Elementary School building before the academy opened, but different areas will be updated over time.
The Academy of Excellence will be adding a 6th grade level for the next school year and is currently enrolling pupils in grades kindergarten through 6th grade. For more information call (330) 746-3970 or visit www.youngstownacedemy.org.