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The Lake Worth Classical Academy, a small, community-focused, academically
rigorous charter school, will open in the downtown Lake Worth area in August of
2015 with grades K-3.
The school will use phonics to teach reading -- not a sprinkling of phonics,
but explicit phonics, proven to teach children to read quickly and well.
It will be a Great Books school, using no textbooks, only the best books
available in the English language for each grade.
As a classical school, students will study human history as a great story,
starting from the beginning with Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and China, and
continuing through to our modern era.
All children will study French beginning in first grade, and Latin beginning in
fourth grade.
The school will be one of the few in South Florida with a strings program that
begins at the elementary level, with all students playing either violin, viola
or cello beginning in fourth grade.
The Lake Worth Classical Academy will be modeled on the Great Hearts Academies
of Arizona, where third grade reading scores on the state assessment last year
were 21 points higher than the state average (87 percent meeting or exceeding
expectations, versus 66 percent for all Arizona third graders).
The average 2013 SAT scores for Great Hearts Academies were all over 1800,
compared to an average SAT score nationwide of about 1500. At Lake Worth High
School, in comparison, the average 2013 SAT score was under 1200. Great Hearts
graduates are also attending some of the top universities and colleges in
America, including several Ivy League schools.
The founders of the Lake Worth Classical Academy are local parents who want a
better education for their children than can be found at Lake Worth's regular
public schools.
A website has been established at www.LakeWorthClassical.org,
with more information about the school. A first informational meeting will be
held in the summer of 2014.
7 comments:
Where is this school going to be located?
I believe it is the church that closed on Federal and 2nd Ave S.
Your first paragraph says the school is grades K-3. Which I'm assuming means 3rd grade. Your 5th and 6th paragraphs say the students will start Latin and strings in 4th grade.
Do you ever get anything right?
It's not my press release, anonymous.
The school opens with grades K-3, as is stated above. One grade will be added each year until it is a full K-12 academy. Thank you for your interest. - Margaret Menge
Latin? French? Exempting those two things it sounds GREAT!
Seems Spanish would be a better fit here than French and Latin?
Thank you. French was chosen because it would be a new language for all or the great majority of the students. French is also: 1. closely related to Latin, the mother of all Romance languages; 2. an important literary language (the French invented the novel) and 3. spoken as a primary or official language on at least three continents. For young students, it will be a lovely second or third language to learn.
There are good reasons for teaching Latin to children. Latin is "the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Romance languages and to the structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents." Dorothy Sayers, author of The Lost Tools of Learning.
Latin is also said be the best grounding for an education, able to train the mind in the way that few other courses of study can.
Some classical schools have children starting Latin in first grade. Others start in fifth or sixth grade. We're going to begin in fourth. - Margaret Menge
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