Academy+School

=The Academy School@44=

The Academy School@44 serves the hardest “hard to teach” grade 7-12 students in the Buffalo Public Schools. For it's first two years of operation, the educational program is provided by ResulTech. Instruction was theme based around career clusters and community-based, high interest projects supported by a computer learning system.

Buffalo is a lot like other urban school districts. They have over 1700 overage students in their secondary schools (including some 17 year old 7th graders). Across the city, they have large numbers of students who have been suspended multiple times in the previous year. And they wonder, as many other large districts do, what they're going to do with all these disenfranchised students.

But Buffalo did something that some other urban districts have not yet done. They recognized that what they were doing was not working and that they needed to do something different. They hired ResulTech to create the Academy School@44 to give students a second chance, to give students the best educational experiences they've ever had, with an engaging curriculum.

Students were selected to attend Academy School@44 because they will benefit from teaching and learning methods that are based on their individual needs, rather than those traditionally in place in schools. Academy School@44 was been designed to become the student’s “new school.” It is our hope that students will enter this new environment and become more successful than they have been in the more traditional school. It was our hope that every student who enters in September will proudly graduate from this school.

Toward this end, Academy School@44 was designed to be different from traditional schools:
 * Positive relationships, and classroom climate and environment
 * High interest projects
 * Teachers actively engaging students
 * Instruction supporting projects, not projects supporting instruction
 * More learning by doing than learning by reading & listening to the teacher
 * Community connections, and work connected to the students interests and lives
 * More higher order thinking activities (apply, analyze, evaluate, create) than recall and understanding activities

The Academy School@44 opened its doors in September of 2006. Both ResulTech and Buffalo Public Schools recognized that it would take three to four years to fully implement its educational program. But by June 2007, [|two external evaluation reports] noted how the program was already succeeding. Find out what they had to say:
 * The [|University of Buffalo Evaluation]
 * The [|National Dropout Prevention Network Evaluation]
 * What the [|National Dropout Prevention Network had to say about the ResulTech School Model]


 * Note:** During the summer of 2008, the Academy School succumbed to political pressure and returned to being a "traditional" alternative school. In no way did this take away from the success experienced by the clusters who most fully implemented the program for two years, or the lessons learned that we are now applying to our other programs. ResulTech continues to supply technical support to the Academy School.

The Schools We Need Project
//Because some students need more than direct instruction.//

The Schools We Need Project is a joint project of the [|Maine Center for Meaningful Engaged Learning] at the [|University of Maine at Farmington] and [|ResulTech Educational Services]