Lewis School to Open for Gifted Students
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- With another school year in the books, Sara Reichard can devote more time to her newest project – The Lewis School, an extension of Youngstown Christian School aimed at gifted students.
Reichard, the gifted intervention specialist at Youngstown Christian School, will be the founding head of the gifted school that opens this fall in Trinity United Methodist Church in downtown Youngstown.
“I was finding over and over again that there are not very many opportunities for specifically gifted students in the area,” she says. These students have to be driven to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, even Columbus for programming that meets their needs, she adds. Youngstown Christian School already serves about 100 special education students, a category that gifted students fall into.
“Gifted is special education also, it’s just the other end of the spectrum,” Youngstown Christian School President Mike Pecchia says. “I think part of it is determining how kids learn. They all learn differently so they have different needs.”
All students enrolled at The Lewis School will have an individualized education plan, he says; annual tuition is $5,500.
“I think one of the problems -- and why we’re getting a lot of interest in our program -- is unfortunately the public schools. With all the funding cuts, they’re not able to meet the individual needs of the kids,” Pecchia says. “In this kind of education … one size doesn’t fit all.”
Right now, the school is accepting only students in the third through sixth grades who their school systems have identified as gifted. If they haven’t officially been accorded that designation under the standards of the Ohio Department of Education, Reichard said, they can take the test through Youngstown Christian School.
As of June 2, there were 20 students enrolled, half the number Reichard said would be the maximum enrollment. A cap of 40 was chosen to keep class sizes small and student-teacher interaction as high as possible. Pecchia estimates there will be 10 to 15 students per class.
“They’re very bright students and we’re thankful for that,” Reichard says. “We’re excited to work with their strengths, but many of their strengths have weaknesses as well. Such weaknesses require that need unique differentiation and opportunities to work with those educational needs.”
Even if enrollment isn’t full, a plan was developed so that the school can operate with a minimum of 15 students. Pecchia says he doesn’t necessarily expect all spots to be filled the first year.
“A lot of times, people don’t want to be the first to try [something] out. If people are going to take their kids out of public school and put them in a new school, they’re going to say, ‘You know what? Let me see how they do in the first year.’,” he observes. “We’re prepared for that. We can open up with 15 [students] and hit a home run.”
The location in downtown Youngstown is “crucial” to the school, Reichard says. Because of the growth downtown, students at The Lewis School will be exposed to the technological and cultural assets of the city.
“We are right around the corner from Oh Wow! [The Children’s Museum for Science and Technology]. We’re three blocks from the 3-D printing at America Makes and eventually a class will be moving down there. There’s the Youngstown Business Incubator. We’re right down the street from [Youngstown State University and its] Dana School of Music,” Reichard says. “We are so close to the heartbeat of the city and all the amazing, wonderful things that are happening.”
The school has two rooms on the ground floor, along with Trinity’s courtyard, while the rest of the rooms are on the second floor of the church. Many of the rooms have been little used in the last 30 years, Reichard says.
Installing technologies that encourage new ways of learning will be part of the renovations made in the empty rooms. Most classrooms will feature Smart Boards and students will be given an iPad to use for classes.
“It’s always good to have a blend of using technology and then hands-on, traditional learning methods as well. But we believe that technology’s here, that it’s not going away any time soon,” Reichard says. “We want to be able teach kids how to use technology to their greatest benefit and usefulness.”
Students will use apps such as Khan Academy, Pages and Keynote to help them learn. The latter two were chosen, Reichard says, to help teach public speaking. “We want to teach students from a young age how to be able to operate in-hand giving a presentation but also being able to speak and present themselves in a very good way.”
Most of the faculty at The Lewis School will be teachers from the Youngstown Christian School, with some Youngstown Christian School faculty teaching select classes downtown.
“We’ll have two to four full-time teachers and then, for example, we’d bring an art teacher down for art time or bring down a music teacher. We may even bring our high school science teacher down to teach areas of science,” Pecchia says.
In the coming years, The Lewis School will expand to include students in the seventh and eight grades. There are no plans to further expand into high school. “High school, intrinsic to its nature, serves gifted students more to their needs,” Reichard explains. “Whatever we do, we want to do well. We thought that this developmental age range, we could service it very well.”
Pictured: Sara Reichard works with students at the Youngstown Christian School's day camp.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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