Tis the season. “What season?” you may ask. It’s the end of the school year and many educators and experts are talking and writing about the state of public education. The consensus is that it’s broken. That comes as no surprise, since even before covid, many educators as well as parents were expressing the same opinion.
Interestingly, over the past week two different parents (no relation to each other) mentioned to me that their elementary-age children had just finished three weeks of standardized testing and that the last two weeks of school would be “fooling around” time. (Both parents used the same phrase – fooling around.)
I’ve been thinking about this ever since I heard it. At our school, the students are still doing projects, using the information they have amassed to connect ideas and knowledge across subjects. The high schoolers are finishing up their 12-page papers and their 5-page papers as well as making presentations to other classes. We call May our Mastery Month and that is what happens here. We tie everything together and share what we have learned – ideas, themes, information, statistics, and skills.
What we do isn’t rocket science – it’s just common sense. If so many students (as the experts point out) came back to school after covid vastly behind in their learning, why would we spend the last five weeks of school not getting them ready for the next year? One recent study said that it would take many students four years to make up for the remote non-learning of covid. Think about that.
My frustration and concern about these statistics aren’t about the students in our school. We were open for face-to-face learning all through covid and, as a result, our students are on track and in many cases, accelerated in their subject matter understanding. What makes me want to cry are all the young children who will spend the rest of their school years trying to catch up. I want so much to bring them to our school with our small class sizes and give them a chance to experience educational success. But sadly, we are a nonprofit and do not have unlimited funds. What we do have here are dedicated teachers with big caring hearts who want more than anything to make a difference. So, I’m asking – right here and right now – if you share our concern, please go to the link HERE click donate, scroll down to the Scholarship Fund in the drop down menu, and donate whatever you can. Better yet, if you, or someone you know, would like to replicate the Island Academy and provide better approaches to education, please get in touch with me. We are happy to help you.
Together we can provide an alternative to this broken public system of education – but it has to be a joint effort. Please join us. For the children.
