New Designs for School
Breakthrough Schools D.C. Round 3 Grantees
16 schools reimagining for more personalized and deeper learning ...
New Designs for School
Monument Academy
New Designs for School
New Designs for School
We’ve all had the experience of truly purposeful, authentic learning and know how valuable it is. Educators are taking the best of what we know about learning, student support, effective instruction, and interpersonal skill-building to completely reimagine schools so that students experience that kind of purposeful learning all day, every day.
emily.bloomfield@monumentacademydc.org
School: Monument Academy
Grades Served: 5-12
Location: Washington, DC
Operator: Monument Academy, Inc.
Operator Type: Charter
Setting: Urban
Students at Start: 35
Students at Capacity: 140
Ethnic composition: Black: 96%, Hispanic/Latino: 2%, Multiple Races: 0.5%, White: 1.5%
Hallmark Feature: Serving students in foster care
This new residential school is intended to meet the unique needs of students in foster care. This school will be design on five pillars: excellent academics, wrap-around services and extended learning time, family engagement, life skills, and emotional and physical well being.
- Monument Academy will work in partnership with TurnAround for Children, DCPS and other potential partners to provide evidence based practices in serving the needs of children who have experienced stress and trauma, particularly youth in foster care or in contact with the child welfare system.
- Monument Academy will also formulate, in partnership with Flamboyan Foundation, effective strategies for family engagement that support student learning and growth in academics, social-emotional wellbeing and life skills
- The model proposed will develop important needs assessments in order to individualize instruction for students’ varying learning needs and to provide flexible online curricular resources for students on-going growth and engagement in learning.
- This model will offer weekday boarding in order to provide stability that promotes long term permanency of students with families/guardians. It also offers extended time for students to receive academic instruction and wrap-around services.
- This model will offer career and technical education, particularly in high growth sectors such as information technology and healthcare, and infuse the schedule with opportunities for exposure to careers and work experience in these fields.
- Monument Academy will document the work it is doing in staff development, as well as provide individualized instruction, trauma-informed approaches to supporting positive behaviors and classroom management, create a schedule that supports social-emotional well being and the delivery of life skills programming in order to provide it on an open source platform, thus allowing others interested in starting similar schools to benefit from the Academy’s experience and learning.