Springtime in Atlanta… doesn’t it feel great!
In four weeks, the Superintendent will take a position and the APS board will vote to determine the future of Atlanta Classical Academy.
Even as we prepare for summer, it is urgent that we do TWO THINGS:
1. Write to the Superintendent and to each school board member, and remind them how urgent it is to create ACA, a new and outstanding Atlanta public school. They DO read their mail, and they need to hear from the voters and taxpayers. (There is a sample letter, address, and email addresses below, but please feel free to share your personal perspective.)
2. Ask ONE more person to sign the petition at AtlantaClassical.org. Signatures from City of Atlanta residents will be most powerful, but you need not have children in the school system to sign. The availability of world-class public schools would benefit everyone!
Learn more about ACA
If you are new to ACA, we invite you to read the posts that follow. Our aim is to pique your interest in classical education and to communicate how a K-12, public charter school would be a major enhancement to Atlanta Public Schools and our city.
Be sure to ‘friend’ us on Facebook.
Finally, please invite your friends or join us on Monday, May 20, 2013 at 6:30 pm at the Covenant Presbyterian Church at 2461 Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA 30305. We will host a short presentation followed by a Q&A session with several of ACA’s founding board members. Please RSVP here. This is a free, public event.
Please help us now so that our team can serve you beginning in the Fall of 2014.
Matthew Kirby and the ACA Launch Team
SCHOOL BOARD REPRESENTATIVES: Click name to send an email or copy and paste the address provided.
Errol Davis, Superintendent – suptoffice@atlanta.k12.ga.us
Ms. Nancy Meister, District 4 - nmeister@atlanta.k12.ga.us
LaChandra D. Butler Burks, District 5 - lbburks@atlantapublicschools.us
Reuben R. McDaniel III, At-Large & Chair - rrmcdaniel@atlanta.k12.ga.us
Brenda J. Muhammad, District 1 - bmuhammad@atlantapublicschools.us
Byron D. Amos, District 2 & Vice Chair - bamos@atlanta.k12.ga.us
Cecily Harsch-Kinnane, District 3 - chkinnane@atlantapublicschools.us
Yolanda Johnson, District 6 - yjohnson@atlantapublicschools.us
Courtney D. English, At-Large - cenglish@atlanta.k12.ga.us
Emmett Johnson, At-Large - edjohnson@atlantapublicschools.us
SAMPLE SCHOOL BOARD LETTER/EMAIL
SUBJECT: PLEASE VOTE YES FOR ATLANTA CLASSICAL ACADEMY
Insert Date
Atlanta Board of Education
130 Trinity Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30303
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board:
Thank you for your leadership and for your work on behalf of the students of Atlanta. I am writing to voice my support for Atlanta Classical Academy, a K-12 public charter school proposing to open in the Fall of 2014.
I hope you will vote to approve this charter when it is presented to the Board, and that you will encourage your fellow Board members to join you in supporting Atlanta Classical Academy.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
{Signature}
Greetings, Atlanta! We have never been so energized by the opportunity to create Atlanta Classical Academy!
Our next public presentation is Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at 12:15 at the Buckhead Library. Please register here.
Join us on May 18th from 2 – 5pm at Atlantic Station for the GCSA’s Charter Schools Rock event! ACA will host a table (thanks to our incredible volunteers). It will be a fun outdoor event with live entertainment and an opportunity to learn more about charter schools in our community.
Please continue to support ACA by signing our online petition, or by sending a letter to members of the APS board and to the Superintendent. These officials do read their mail, and we can positively influence their decision…but only if we speak up! For more ideas on how you might get involved, please refer to this post.
Already, we have attracted hundreds of families who are passionate about our “American classical” academic model.
Furthermore, we have employment inquiries from Georgia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Virgin Islands, and even Rome, Italy. This group of high caliber teachers and administrators are attracted to ACA, an APS school! When this happens, our entire school district wins!
We are eager to move forward with the hiring process, but first things first…we must get approved by Atlanta Public Schools!
To that end, our board assembled on Thursday for a three hour training session to prepare for our mid-May interview with Atlanta Public Schools’ staff. We will meet again next week to continue our preparation. We have a high-quality board that will work well together to uphold the mission of our school.
We are eager to create
- capacity where we need it;
- public choice where we do not have it;
- an environment that attracts more world-class teachers and administrators to Atlanta Public Schools; and
- a time-tested academic model that is earning national accolades in school districts across America.
Please continue to spread the good word about ACA.
Warmly,
Matthew Kirby and ACA Board of Directors
On behalf of our Board of Directors, I am writing to say THANK YOU to our growing team of supporters! If you are sharing the news about ACA with your family, friends, or co-workers…that means you!
Last week, we turned in our school plan to Atlanta Public Schools! It is still critical that we build community awareness and support.
Action items: What to do now.
Our immediate objective is to demonstrate to APS board members that voters in our community support Atlanta Classical Academy. If you support ACA please help us secure 1 more petition signature! (The form is immediately to the right.) Our self-imposed goal is to reach 2,000 signatures, and we have approximately 1,400 signatures today. If we all earn just 1 more signature, we would rapidly exceed our goal. Please remind people to look for and click the confirmation email when it arrives!
Invite your friends and neighbors to upcoming presentations. These are lively, informative talks during which we describe classical education and our school plan. These are great opportunities to meet board members, and every session ends with a question and answer period. Upcoming presentations:
- Thursday, April 25, 10:30am, Ponce de Leon Library (in about an hour!)
- Monday, April 29, 6pm, Northside Parkway Library
- Wednesday, May 8, 12pm, Buckhead Library
- Please register for presentations here.
Email info@atlantaclassical.org if you would like an ACA yard sign.
Friend us on Facebook, and post a short answer to this question, “I support Atlanta Classical Academy because….”
Send a letter of support for ACA to APS board members. We have provided a template, or feel free to draft something more original. I can tell you, APS board members are reading their mail!
- Nancy Meister, District 4 (Jackson, Rivers, Smith, Brandon, Garden Hills, Sutton, N. Atlanta)
- LaChandra D. Butler Burks, District 5 (Bolton Academy)
- Reuben R. McDaniel III, At-Large & Chair
- Brenda J. Muhammad, District 1
- Byron D. Amos, District 2 & Vice Chair
- Cecily Harsch-Kinnane, District 3
- Yolanda Johnson, District 6
- Courtney D. English, At-Large
- Emmett Johnson, At-Large
Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education, 130 Trinity Avenue, Atlanta, GA 30303, Fax: 404-802-1807
Special thank you
Dozens of you have volunteered to make ACA a reality, but special thanks are due to our petition consultants Kristin Moody and Ashley Bollwerk. They worked around the clock in the final week to finalize our 300+ page business plan.
Also, our Community Development Team deserves special recognition. Our petition demonstrates strong public support – over three times the number of petition signatures that most APS charter schools submit! We could not have gathered such public support without our team led by Mikki Hawkins, Kathy David, Binita Vijay, Luci Anderson, Hannah Cousar, Kristin Rohrer, Emily Carlson, Ms. Dudley Franklin, Frank Bazzel, Kevin Richter, and many more. I am grateful for the hard work you have done and will do!
Finally, we could not have accomplished this without our financial supporters. We have assembled a dedicated team of private donors and foundations, and it is our aim to use these dollars wisely in a way that brings honor to Atlanta and quality options to students and families in our city.
Next steps: We seek APS approval
Our next steps include:
- Mid-May: ACA board and select advisors will interview with APS’s staff
- Late-May: APS Department of Innovation makes its recommendation to the Superintendent
- Early June: Superintendent will make his recommendation to APS Board
- June 10th: APS Board scheduled to vote on our petition
- August 1: Petition is due to Georgia Department of Education for final approval
Clarifications
The points that follow may help you clarify those ideas that float around the ‘rumor mill’. By all means, if you are not sure how to respond to a question about our school, please call me. There is much misinformation related to charter schools (and our particular school), and it is important that we communicate clearly with our friends and neighbors.
Location: Our petition includes several locations that are viable. We are still working to determine the best site that fits the needs of our community and APS. The school will be located in the north Atlanta area.
Employment: Because we have received so many employment inquires, we now allow applicants to submit their contact information on our main contact form at AtlantaClassical.org. We will begin to carefully consider applicants once we have been approved. We will consider every applicant fairly, but we are looking for teachers who have demonstrated a commitment to the classical model. We plan to hire approximately 40 teachers in our first year, and we already have nearly twice that many who are interested. When we select extraordinarily talented teachers, our students will be the winners!
Attendance zone: ACA would be open to all APS students in grades K – 10 in its first year (2014).
Enrollment: ACA will give enrollment preference to only children of full-time employees or board members of the school, and siblings of children otherwise enrolled in the school. Our enrollment period would start in January 2014.
State charter school commission: Will ACA attempt to become a State Commission Charter School? We are aware of our options. But this is a community-driven initiative. We love this city, and our goal is to partner with APS to create an outstanding school that attracts top-tier teachers from all over the country to Atlanta Public Schools. We want ACA to be an APS school.
Children with special limitations: There are technicalities to consider, but generally speaking, if a child could otherwise attend a ‘traditional’ APS public school, he or she would be eligible to attend ACA. We have planned a robust staff of ‘student services’ specialists, and our aim is to serve children at all stages of readiness with excellence.
See basic FAQ’s here.
Major messages
What primary benefits does ACA offer children, families, and Atlanta Public Schools? ACA is a win-win, because…
ACA would be Metro Atlanta’s only K-12 public classical school, and this will enhance APS’ influence in the region. ACA would provide Atlanta with a time-tested academic model that is similar to schools that have been nationally recognized for excellence. ACA’s model school, Ridgeview Classical Academy in Ft. Collins, CO., was ranked the #4 high school in the nation (of 21,000 schools) by U.S. News and World Report a few years ago. They are currently ranked the #2 high school in Colorado. Ridgeview graduates a very high percentage of its 9th graders, and they attend state colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges, service academies, and Ivy League schools. ACA is part of an informal, national network of classical schools that is delivering excellence.
ACA is already attracting top-tier, classically trained teacher/scholars from across the nation and abroad, and this will benefit our students, our city, and Atlanta Public Schools. Advisory Council members include, in part, Dr. Terrence Moore, founding principal of our model school; Dr. Richard A. LaFleur, one of the world’s top Latin scholars; and Ross Rossin, a globally recognized classical portrait artist with works in the Smithsonian. ACA advisors are attracting scholarly teachers who are committed to the classical method.
ACA would ultimately add capacity to a community where the schools are very large, and very full. APS indicated in its 2011 Capacity Utilization Study that the northern cluster has a capacity of 8,385 seats, and it expects enrollment to increase to 10,000 students by 2019. The Study says that in this community, there is “no available excess capacity and a limited ability to expand existing schools.” So, ultimately, another 750 seats represents an additional 8.9% in capacity. If APS does have excess capacity in the north cluster, it is because schools are getting larger and more crowded. Or, it is because more families are leaving the system. ACA aims to provide a remedy for both of these challenges and simultaneously provide families with a different kind of academic experience…a choice.
ACA would provide parents with the freedom to choose the public school option that best suits the needs of their child. While there are 13 charter schools open in APS today, Atlanta’s largest geographic cluster has none. There are dozens of independent studies that demonstrate that in school districts that provide parents with options, everyone benefits.
Encouraging update from a ‘cousin’ in Texas
I spoke last week with Jason Caros, founding principal of Founders Academy in Lewisville, Texas. Founders Academy (like Atlanta Classical) has modeled carefully after Ridgeview Classical Schools in Ft. Collins, and Founders is just finishing its first year. In short, they are doing everything that we are selling, and it is working marvelously. Enrollment started at 500 and will increase to 750 in Year 2. Students who are behind are catching up. Top-notch teachers are seeking out a public, classical school (just as they are finding us, as well). Classical school (peaceful) culture has come to fruition. It is wonderful to know that we are joining a network of schools that follow a similar academic, philosophical, and cultural model…and it is proving itself (again) to be effective and irresistible. That is great news for Atlanta!
Final word of encouragement
Several members of the ACA family are doing wonderful work in our community…and they are contributing many hours to ACA without financial compensation. If you are looking to partner with local organizations that are already at work in our community, please consider supporting Agape Community Center (Nell Benn, ACA board member), LaAmistad (Cat McAfee, ACA board member), and BCM (Ms. Dudley Franklin, ACA advisory council member). I mention this now…ahead of our approval…because if we are to become a bridge-building organization that models civic involvement for our children, why not start now?
Please stay close to our blog or sign up to receive email updates. Let me know if I can do anything for you.
Warm regards,
Matthew Kirby and ACA’s Board of Directors
Friends, we will deliver our petition (school plan) to Atlanta Public Schools today! This document represents a tremendous amount of work from the entire Launch Team. By “Launch Team”, we mean every person who contributed – and there are hundreds of you!
We thought you might like a sneak-peak of the plan. APS asked us to summarize the strengths of our petition in 300 words, and here is what we told them:
Summary of Strengths
ACA is positioned to provide a unique, K-12, public school option in an area of the district that offers no other public school choice, and ACA would increase public school capacity in a community that desperately needs it. But the innovation proposed herein is not “new”. The classical model of education has been successfully implemented for 2,500 years. Classical charter schools across the country are closing the achievement gap, proving that a return to the basics – teacher-led instruction, content-rich curriculum, phonics-based literacy, great books in the Western tradition, high standards for student behavior and performance, and even Latin – is one of the most effective ways to meet the needs of diverse learners. Results from schools like Ridgeview Classical, which ranked 4th in the nation among 21,000+ high schools, are the reason founders are bringing these best practices to APS students.
ACA’s advisory council includes nationally recognized experts who have already attracted dozens of high-quality teacher candidates and other founders. Dr. Terrence Moore wrote the curriculum and operations manual for Ridgeview; Dr. LaFleur is one of the world’s top Latin scholars; Ross Rossin is a globally recognized classical portrait artist with works in the Smithsonian.
Using teachers who model virtues and teach cultural literacy as a complement to rigorous academic skills, ACA will produce knowledgeable, tenacious, inquisitive, responsible American citizens who are positioned to successfully pursue any endeavor. ACA’s board is distinguished by its ability to fundraise and its collective expertise in school governance and administration, financial management, entrepreneurship, organizational leadership, and a clear commitment to serving the needs of all students in our great city. Focused on ACA, the board is also eager to continue its collaboration with APS. ACA’s network of high caliber professionals leverages tremendous resources, experience, and expertise on behalf of APS students and families.
Please sign our petition of support (if you have not already done so). Thank you.
Please join us or invite a friend to an upcoming informational presentation and Q&A session.
Follow us on Facebook.
In light of yesterday’s bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, it seems wholly fitting to remind our readers of this:
ACA is an American public school.*
But what exactly does that mean?
The Founding Fathers of this nation held that schools should prepare young people for civic life and their civic responsibilities. Likewise, the ancients designed education for participation in the civic life of the polis or the republic. Indeed, the word republic itself comes from two Latin words, res publica, meaning “the public thing.” When at the close of the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the men now known as the Framers had given the country, he famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The Founding Fathers knew that a republican frame of government requires an informed citizenry educated in the public things. To this end, public schools used to teach “civics,” a series of courses throughout the primary and secondary grades whose purpose was to teach young people the history and theory of their constitutional order, an achievement that, however much influenced by ancient experience and thought, was unique at the time of the Founding and remains a model of self-government today.
We regret two related trends in modern education: the shocking ignorance among our young people today regarding the American tradition of self-government on the one hand and the hostility towards civics education as being somehow a form of “indoctrination” reminiscent of Nazism and thereby undermining a greater world harmony on the other. The two trends have to be related because only someone wholly ignorant of the sacrifices made by the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy, who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, who later formed and executed the Marshall Plan, and who for almost half a century, in a war that was not entirely ‘cold,’ checked the oppressive grip of communist totalitarianism, could say something so utterly foolish as that a proper American civics education is either fascistic or narrowly Anglo-centric.
Atlanta Classical unapologetically embraces a thorough immersion in American government, history, literature, and arts, as well as the related discipline of economics, which vindicates the Founding Fathers’ understanding of human nature, of civil society, and of the capacity of the individual following his own conscience under the rule of law. So important is the civic-minded mission of Atlanta Classical that another way of thinking about our enterprise is as “an education worthy of the Founding Fathers,” both the education they had in their youth and the education they recommended for “generations yet unborn.” In other words, we are in the business of keeping our Republic, not forgetting it or bashing it. Such is the proper and necessary role of public education in a nation with a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Such a purpose does not deny the integrity and importance of other nations. As stated succinctly by E. D. Hirsch, an educational pioneer who describes himself as a man of the “Old Left”: “We don’t live in France or China. It is a duty of American schools to educate competent American citizens.” Nor does it claim that this nation has always done right in every moment of its history. Rather, any true study of civics begins with the clear aims of the American regime, stated time and again by the Founders, but most memorably as,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Founding Fathers created a clear standard by which the “American experiment” is to be judged. When Americans have lived up to this high aim, they have flourished. When they have departed from it, they have done so to their own detriment. Through the clear lens of the Declaration we both study American history and learn to govern ourselves.
*This series is adapted from Dr. Terrence O. Moore’s article “What Kind of School is Ridgeview?”. Dr. Moore, our primary academic designer and advisor, is the founding principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools, the school after which we have modeled ACA. Members of the Ridgeview Classical Institute continue to share their experience with ACA’s leadership team. In 2008, U.S. News and World Report ranked Ridgeview Classical Schools’ high school as the 15th in the country, 4th U.S. charter school, and 4th open-enrollment high school in the nation among 21,069 public high schools in 48 states.
Atlanta Classical is a school for the sciences…
But first…five short announcements!
1. Please sign our petition (if you have not done so already)! It is immediately to the right on this page.
2. Our next informational presentation is Monday, April 22nd at 7pm at the Harry Norman Realtors Intown office (near Ansley Mall). Register here.
3. On April 11th, The Buckhead Council of Neighborhoods approved a letter of support for ACA! While our school would be open to all APS students, it is a big deal to generate this sort of endorsement from the immediate community!
4. We are now capturing people’s interest in employment opportunities with ACA through our contact database. You can either update your contact information or sign up for the first time (to the right). Thank you to our Advisory Council member Dr. Rick LaFleur who is creating quite a buzz among teachers across the country. When ACA attracts top talent, our children, families, and APS win! Please be patient; we will not be responding to applications until after we are approved.
5. Stand-by…next week we will update you on our newest Board Members. I cannot wait to share this with you…we have worked hard to assemble an incredible team!
ACA is a school for the sciences.*
Our students spend a lot of time reading one tremendously great and beautiful and mysterious book that does not fit neatly between two cardboard covers. We mean the “book of nature.” The purpose of education is for human beings to discover and understand the world. That means the human world and also the physical world around them. Although the rhetoric surrounding a classical school such as ACA often emphasizes the humanities, the sciences are no less important than the humanistic disciplines and do not take a “back seat” in any way. Indeed, Atlanta Classical’s pursuit of knowledge requires serious attention to be given to the sciences and to math. The traditions of both the ancients and the Founding Fathers held that human reason compels thinking people to explore and to explain the order of the universe. Aristotle was a scientist as much as an ethicist or political philosopher. Greek civilization gave us Euclid as well as Euripides. The awe-inspiring art of Michelangelo drew upon a re-discovery of Galen and of the human form and coincided with the birth of modern medical faculties. A compelling case could be made that the greatest American achievement—our Constitution—would not have been written had the eighteenth century not been immersed in the physics and astronomy of Newton.
A more-than-historical and more-than-pedagogical reason, though, impels us to teach our students the sciences and mathematics with energy and rigor. Even as we Americans live in a great age of science and discovery, our people become increasingly scientifically and mathematically illiterate. The number of native-born citizens doing graduate work in the sciences continues to diminish. And the complex moral problems arising from novel technologies (such as cloning) challenge us to think about the very nature of the human being even as we strive to make man’s physical existence healthier and more pleasant.
Atlanta Classical teaches the real “math” behind the mathematics and the real “science” behind physics, biology, and chemistry. In other words, our students—who must absolutely master their math and science facts—cultivate mathematical and scientific minds by learning the why behind the what. Newton’s and Boyle’s laws did not drop from the heavens, nor did Pythagoras’s theorem pop out of a textbook. Rather, the means of understanding an ordered universe resulted from these thinkers’ painstaking observation and reasoning about the world before their very eyes. Science is not a thing that sits lifeless in a bulky textbook but a habit of mind often called the “scientific method.” This method of reasoning, not individual bits of technology themselves, has ushered in over the last four centuries what we generally call “progress.” If the habit of mind is lost, so will be progress. The intense interest our students cultivate in the human condition through the study of history, literature, and allied subjects, then, is no less manifest in our inquiry into the beauties of nature and of numerical relations.
*This series is adapted from Dr. Terrence O. Moore’s article “What Kind of School is Ridgeview?”. Dr. Moore, our primary academic designer and advisor, is the founding principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools, the school after which we have modeled ACA. Members of the Ridgeview Classical Institute continue to share their experience with ACA’s leadership team. In 2008, U.S. News and World Report ranked Ridgeview Classical Schools’ high school as the 15th in the country, 4th U.S. charter school, and 4th open-enrollment high school in the nation among 21,069 public high schools in 48 states.
Atlanta Classical is a Core Knowledge school. We teach cultural literacy. There are many things anyone living in this country and in the larger world needs to know. Armed with this knowledge, the young man or woman easily enters into worlds of meaning lost on the uninformed spectator. At Atlanta Classical, skills act as the servants; content is king.
FINAL PUSH! Please sign our online petition today! It is immediately to the right on this page. We need to maximize our signatures before Friday! Please encourage your spouse, friends, neighbors and co-workers to sign TODAY!
Atlanta Classical is a back-to-basics school. Students learn to read, to write, to do arithmetic. They memorize poems and multiplication tables and elements on the periodic chart. The students have homework: every student, every day. The backpacks are not just for show. The students learn to diagram sentences. They punctuate. Spelling counts. “A” is for mastery, not for effort. The student soon learns there is no mastery without effort and no genuine effort without real reward.
Atlanta Classical is a character-building school. We hold to the self-evident truth known to the ancients and to the Founding Fathers that virtue is the well-charted but too-little-traveled road to true happiness. Those virtues, sources of our moral excellence, consist in the bold ancient virtues— temperance, courage, justice, prudence—as well as the softer virtues, both ancient and modern—honesty, politeness, gratitude—that weave the noble tapestry of life. They study the virtues in the great stories, real and imaginary, that comprise the human pageant. In time, they read the philosophic truth of Socrates:
“Wealth does not bring about virtue, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for men.”
Character pervades the curriculum. Character—not magic—is the source of Cinderella’s reward. Character—in the form of industry—leads Franklin to discover and to invent. Character—as we are told through the story of the Ring of Gyges—points to “the actions of a man if he knew he would never be found out” (Macaulay). Character is the hard currency—as Washington showed—with which heroism (or simply goodness) is gained and nations are made.
At Atlanta Classical, it is not our design to make students behave grudgingly and only when a teacher is in the room. Our sole concern is not just to keep them from cheating on tests. True, we insist upon discussion in the classroom, decorum in the halls. Yet our greater hope is that young people will do the good for the best reason of all: because they love it.
Atlanta Classical is a classical school. The ancients created a blueprint of a political, cultural, and moral order—aiming at justice—from which Western civilization has been built. In their own education the Founding Fathers of this nation mastered that classical blueprint and from it, with important additions of their own, built the American nation. We shall never truly understand the monument unless we examine the blueprint and the subsequent building of the structure. To understand the West and America, we, too, must go back to the sources. Ad fontes! as the men of the Renaissance said. Back to the sources of the good, and the beautiful, and the true.
Accordingly, students at Atlanta Classical spend a lot of time with the past, particularly the classical past, the histories and literature of Greece and Rome, in order better to know our own heritage, in order to know not only what “mistakes to avoid” but what excellences to pursue, cherish, and reward.
This series is adapted from Dr. Terrence O. Moore’s article “What Kind of School is Ridgeview?” Dr. Moore, our primary academic designer and advisor, is the founding principal of Ridgeview Classical Schools, the school after which we have modeled ACA. In 2008, U.S. News and World Report ranked Ridgeview Classical Schools’ high school the 15th in the country, 4th U.S. charter school, and 4th open-enrollment high school in the nation among 21,069 public high schools in 48 states.
Please help us earn by sharing this link: http://eepurl.com/wx4_r
And don’t forget to join us on Facebook too!
What is CLASSICAL EDUCATION?
In a phrase, classical education is liberal arts with a purpose.
And the purpose is to prepare graduates to take their place as responsible, productive, happy members of society.
But to explain classical education in a phrase is to miss an opportunity. So please keep reading…
Please encourage others to sign our petition!
Over the past month, hundreds of Atlanta’s parents and educators have attended our public presentations. As of April 4th, we have approximately 1,000 petition signatures…we are well on our way to our goal of 2,000 signatures of support!
Please sign our online petition today! It is immediately to the right on this page. This is THE KEY to creating the ACA opportunity for Atlanta. We will be offering another series of public meetings in late-April and May, and we need your support today!
Four major benefits to creating Atlanta Classical Academy
- Additional capacity in a community where the public schools are large and crowded
- Freedom to choose the best public school option according to the specific needs of your children
- A new leadership model that places a focused, highly-qualified board of directors in position to serve the needs of our children, families and the community responsively and with excellence.
- The opportunity for our Atlantans to experience the richness and the height of classical education
The heart of the matter
ACA, a proposed K-12 APS charter school, will offer a content-rich curriculum that emphasizes mathematics, science, foreign languages (including mandatory Latin in grades 6 – 9), the arts, history, and literature. An early emphasis on phonics-based literacy, numeracy, grammar and vocabulary will prepare students to enter formative ‘conversations’ with history’s greatest scientific, literary, and philosophical thinkers…and with one another.
Every ACA employee will be expected to teach and model habits of excellence like humility, courage, inquisitiveness, tenacity, and self-control.
Classical education can mean different things to different people, so in the next few articles, we will use ACA’s mission statement to introduce the philosophical promise of classical education.
We deeply appreciate your interest.
If you have not already, please do sign the petition to demonstrate your support.
Matthew Kirby & the ACA Launch Team
