Scholastic Academy, Alternative School switching locations

Published 9:51 am Tuesday, June 16, 2015

SWITCHEROO: Grove Street School will become the home of Scholastic Academy beginning in August.

SWITCHEROO: Grove Street School will become the home of Scholastic Academy beginning in August.

 

Beginning with the 2015–2016 school year, Scholastic Academy and Grove Street Alternative School will be switching locations.

Scholastic Academy will now meet at the Grove Street location and the alternative school will be located on the first floors of Vicksburg Junior High School and Warren Central Junior High School, superintendent Chad Shealy said.

Email newsletter signup

Sign up for The Vicksburg Post's free newsletters

Check which newsletters you would like to receive
  • Vicksburg News: Sent daily at 5 am
  • Vicksburg Sports: Sent daily at 10 am
  • Vicksburg Living: Sent on 15th of each month

“The mindset behind this was (Scholastic Academy) grew too big to be contained on the hall on the bottom floor of Vicksburg Junior High,” he said.

Shealy said because the focus of Scholastic Academy is engineering, robotics classes will be offered to every student at the school.

As part of the engineering push, a $44,000 grant will be used to build a STEM lab, Shealy said.

“It was born out of a meeting with Dr. Jeff Holland out at ERDC,” he said. “I walked through and I was like a kid in a candy store. I couldn’t believe anything like this existed, and I was unaware of it.”

Shealy said the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center has thus far been a largely untapped resource, but that will be changing.

“I knew it was a high priority of mine, and I began telling the board early on that this was a direction I wanted to go,” he said. “When we began to talk about what an engineering school in Vicksburg would look like, we began to talk about the best way to make sure we increased that interest, not just finding kids that were already going to be engineers.”

That’s how Scholastic Academy was born, Shealy said, as a middle school that focuses on STEM education.

“We’ve got a lot of options that we’ll be giving to kids, and I’m pretty excited about it,” he said. “We’re currently giving Grove a facelift and getting the paint and the facilities ready.”

The alternative school is in the process of being revamped too, Shealy said, adding they are looking toward a model being used in Tennessee.

“They approach the alternative school almost with an application process,” he said. “It focuses on changing the way the kids get to be successful instead of the holding cell of punishment mindset. We’re trying to get away from that.”

Shealy said many of the students are excellent students who make bad choices.

“We actually have the bottom wing on Vicksburg Junior High which is completely separate,” he said. “The way the wing is set up it will be it’s own separate school.”

The elementary school students will be relocated to the first floor of Warren Central Junior High School.

“All of their services will be provided to them on those halls — all their food, electives and everything,” he said. “They won’t be going and interacting at all with either of the other junior highs.”

Additionally there will be separate start and end times for the students at the alternative schools.

“We look at it from a very positive standpoint,” he said. “We really get to start figuring out what’s going on with kids and answer that.”