We had the open house in February (with enrollments for next year arising from that event!). Yes, it was a cloudy somewhat rainy day. But, people came out. We had folks from when we opened at 10 am until ... well, really, until we finished cleaning up and were on our way out! It was wonderful to see some of the current students present to visit with the visiting parents. It was also great because we had a couple of folks interested in working at RPA there also. I think a great time was had by all. This Early February event was followed by having a booth at the Women in Business Expo in Myrtle Beach towards the end of February.

feel free to contact, Ms. Delaney at the school, 854-925-0401!
          I also was able to make an academic presentation about the school start up process at my conference, Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship. It was held in Albuquerque, NM during March 6-10.

My full time job of teaching at CCU began with my teaching all of my class in the shortened term of Spring 2! I have been very busy teaching and grading since then. I also chatted a bit with a staff member there at CCU about research on happiness. She had a little quip on her office door about what makes for happiness and I decided to look into that a bit more. I found out that the longest research on adult happiness was done by Harvard. That study of over 75 years and 700+ people, found that close relationships are key to a long, healthy and happy life! A quick summary of his talk and 4 key lessons from it is available online (click here). It found that neither money

nor success lead to a long happy healthy life... but rather having warm close relationships with others led to such a life. Those who had such warm loving relationships as children continued to have such relationships with others over the 3/4 of a century since! Yet again, support for our philosophy and design of our school.

Our small tutorial-like classes where students spend multiple years with the same loving enthusiastic teachers allows for the creation of close warm relationships. The family-sized classes allow for children to experience close sibling-like relationships. We wholeheartedly believe that this type of  culture and our honor code which helps us establish and maintain this close supportive culture is one element which makes RPA unique and different from other educational options available in the area today. Since your child will spend most of their waking hours at school, isn't it the type of environment that you want for them too?!
         Check out some more of what Robert Waldinger says on this Ted Talk! Heads up… its about 12 minutes long. FYI, relationship quality matters! Spoiler alert… Loneliness kills. Good friends at work and after work (those you can count on to help in tough times) make for a longer happier healthier lives.

Research has shown that parents consider a variety of topics as they choose a school for their children. Over sixteen articles since 1992 have shown that parents’ main concern centers on academic quality[1]. Altenhofen et al. (2016) noted that quality has been measured in a variety of ways ranging from test scores to methods of instruction.  One fairly local study up in the Charlotte area found that parents weight test results higher when they are known about several alternative school choices[2] (Hastings & Weinstein, 2008). Families that are less financially stressed tend to differentiate more between schools on important dimensions than those families which are financially stressed are aware of[3]. One difference is actually visiting the schools under consideration. That personal exploration of the available school choice didn’t seem to garner as much consideration as out of school activities like sports and art experiences which was a shame since according to Lareau (page 198) choosing a school is “one of the most economically and socially consequential decision of their lives.”
So as we come to the end of this week, have you gone or made arrangements to go and visit school to see how children are being treated? To see the resources being provided? To see the range of work that children are encourage and required to complete? Doing online searches of schools is important. Determining the “results” of the educational experience (i.e. test scores or other outcome measures) is also important but just as it is important to personally check out day cares, so, too, is it important to personally check out the schools under consideration.

At the Renaissance Preparatory Academy we value your visits. While it is important to not disrupt the children’s work days (i.e. we are a small school by design and are just beginning our growth), we regularly hold open houses and this February we are opening an open house where some of our children will come in on a Saturday morning and engage in a condensed version of our school day via some “mock” lessons while parents and others interested can tour the facility and do a “silent” walk through the various classrooms!

    This Curriculum Interactive Open House is
                on Saturday, February 10
                   beginning at 10am
                     at our school site
      which is at 3301 33rd Avenue No., MB
                (in the square building behind the Greek Orthodox Church).
        Call Ms. Delaney at 854-528-0401
    for more information about the school

Many private schools have enrollment for the next school year beginning in February or March preceding that start. This up-coming week is National School Choice Week. I recently came across an article by the President of the organization that sponsors that event, Andrew Campanella. His article, Time to focus on school choice, was in the South Strand News on January 11, 2018.

I appreciate Andrew’s pointing out the many options available to parents here in the Grand Strand. On the public school branch of the education tree, we find regular neighborhood public schools, public magnet schools, and charter schools. On the non-public school branch of the education tree, we find private schools and homeschools. On the private school branch, we find for profit private schools and non-profit private schools. Many for-profit private schools are kindergarten/day care establishments. On the Non-profit private school branch are often found religious private schools, secular private schools, and niche private schools that address specific student conditions. On the homeschool branch, we find solo homeschooling parents and those who operate under a cooperative homeschool umbrella. With such a plethora of options, how do you choose which school meets the needs of your family. Having the right to make such a choice is a public policy issues that Andrew Campanella addressed. He rightly pointed out that more now than ever before parents are stepping up and making the choice for their children’s education.

Our public school districts’ webpages clearly delineate the attributes of all schools operating under their umbrella and receiving funding from local, state and national governmental sources. These school do not charge tuition even though they do have heavy fundraising for supplemental programs that these governmental agencies have determined to not be priority.  It fells like that, at times, "no child left behind"  becomes every child left at lowered standards. Bullying of oth children and teachers has left many schools with a culture of aggression and not one that supports learning.

Many in our area have chosen to homeschool for one or more years. Some choose to go alone, others via online schools, and others through coops. However, other parents attempt this option but find that the discipline and level of work required is more than they care to do for the long term. At times, advanced courses seem overwhelming.

In the private for-profit school section in our area seems limited to higher education (i.e. post-high school). In any private school, parents or other benefactors pay tuition for the children’s education. Mr. Campanella indicated that there may be some state level programs of scholarships or tuition assistance for some children which would help offset tuition.

Non-profit private schools occupy many niches. Religious private schools may be sponsored by a single religious organizations (the Catholic school system is one such organized system sponsored by a single religion [see St. Andrews Catholic School] and the Chabad Jewish Academy] or a standalone one that takes a religious orientation (The Christian Academy of Myrtle Beach). We have many religious private schools in the area. These are particularly attractive to parents who want either religious orientations intertwined with secular academics or who wish to view secular academics through a religious lens.

A final category of which we have very few examples is the private secular school. The Renaissance Preparatory Academy fits into this category. We are non-profit project of the Social Good Fund with local control and design. The school is tuition and donation funded. It accepts no funds from any one religion or any level of government. You can see its features on the blog for the school. Its distinctive features include being an ABC or advancement by competence approach. This means a mastery approach with high expectations and strong accountability.  As students master the material for a grade in both math and language arts, they are promoted at the start of any term to the next grade level. Students are not held back so that all students receive the same low level/low expectation homogenous blah curriculum but are individually challenged to work hard and advance. Our culture is based on our honor code which is used for classroom behavior rules and also guides our faculty.

So as you are faced with the choice for this next year, we hope that you will check out and choose Renaissance Preparatory Academy for a strong education that meets your child’s specific needs. We begin accepting enrollment for the 2018-2019 school year on February 1, 2018. Call the Headmaster at 854-529-0401!

Explore your choices. Make the right choice for your child. We hope that we are that choice for your family!

Janice Black, Founder and Chair of the School Board

Some schools require less and a national survey found that often 43 minutes a night for four nights was assigned in elementary classrooms while up to 53 minutes a night was assigned for a regular high school work load (UOPX, 2014). That time increases to recommended levels of 2 hours of homework a week for each class that an honors student takes in high school (Barrientos, 2010). Most high school programs require 5 to 7 different classes per day. This means that 10 to 12 hours a week of homework (Barrientos, 2010) or up to 17.5 (UOPX, 2014) hours a week of homework are required. If that is done during 4 nights a week, that is 2 hours per night to 4.5 hours a night. High school students begin to lose the benefit of doing homework when the homework workload reaches 3.5 hours per night (Barrientos, 2010)! Unfortunately, the more recent trends indicate that even elementary school students may be reaching that burn out level.

So, students are spending between 8.5 and 11.5 hours a day doing academic work when in the public school. This averages to 10 hours a day in academic curriculum (with little to none of it engaged in physical activity). This does not leave much time for family time, other activities, or even eating and sleeping and transport time. The higher number seems the norm if they are in a gifted and talented program in elementary school or in an honors/AP program in high school (Barrientos, 2010). This results in an unbalanced dynamic in the opposite direction from homeschooling. The net result is there is often little time for family and other activities beyond meeting the required curriculum.

 In terms of customization, private schools fall somewhere between homeschooling and public schools. Many private schools, like The Renaissance Preparatory Academy (RPA), customize the learning experiences if not to the individual child, then, at least to a small group of children.  There is great variation on the assignment of homework in the private school setting. Because the Renaissance Preparatory Academy has an explicit policy, we will use the standards of RPA. RPA has a longer school day. It lasts from 8 am to 4 pm. Within that 8 hours is an hour of PE/recess and a half hour lunch. PE (structured physical activity) and recess (unstructured time including physical activities) are both explicit parts of our curriculum so the time available for curriculum is 7.5 hours. Our homework philosophy is that it is assigned only if there is a purpose for it such as the student needs the additional time to complete work to meet a jointly chosen deadline. Often children can accomplish all of their work to meet their term goals within a school day. We do have regular reading homework that needs to be done: students must read five of seven nights and the required time ranges from 5 minutes to 30 minutes at a setting.    Typically, then our academic day is a total of 7 hours thirty-five minutes to 8 hours long. The academic learning results, though, from earlier testing of students using our curriculum are children with skill sets 1 to 2 grades above their assigned grade. We include active movement in our curriculum so that students are not always stationary. Because our reading assignment can be accomplished at the family’s discretion, we have a fairly balanced dynamic that requires about 1/3 of the day for academic work, just over 1/3 of a day for personal necessities (1/3+), and the remaining slightly less than 1/3 of a day for home life and other activities. Thus, our dynamic at the Renaissance Preparatory Academy is a more balanced one.

Funny enough, homework is a contentious topic when it comes to scholarly research.  Some argue for it and others argue against it with the majority view cycling between these two view points over the years (Marzano and Pickering, 2007). A decade ago, Marzano and Pickering concluded that homework should have four qualities: 1) it should be purposeful for learning; 2) Students should be able to accomplish it independently with a relatively high success rate; 3) Parents can be a sounding board but not teachers of the content; 4) The amount of homework should be age appropriate and not infringe too much on home life. Let’s look at each of this in our school’s context. Remember, we are a school that has small class sizes (the smallest being like a family) that requires Mastery learning done within a longer than average school day.

Our context means that we have time in our school day to accomplish work that might otherwise in a school with a shorter day and a larger class size need to be done as homework. However, our Mastery approach means that was chosen because students typically score a full standard deviation higher using a mastery approach than in the current spiral learning environment. This increase is less in national standardized tests but there is still an improvement (Kulick, Kulick, Banger-Drowns, 1990).

In our school, students are expected to learn material to the point that they can rapidly and correctly do a task or summarize accurately how a task completed relates to school topics (like reporting on what a chapter was about after reading it). So, we have two tensions in the school: we should have the time to accomplish assigned work within the school day versus repeating tasks to gain mastery on the topic. If our school time is not sufficient for mastery to occur, we will send items needed to be mastered home as homework. We will periodically quiz students on previously mastered topics and if mastery has lapsed, again, we’ll send it home as homework. Now to consider how much school work is appropriate for a child.

Homework needs to limited in time. In fact, the amount of time that something takes is not as critical a factor as the accomplishment of it within a certain time limit to a standard of quality.  Thus, reading a chapter in ten minutes and writing a sentence on the important point of the chapter is more valuable than a long time spent intermittently with distractions to accomplish the same thing. The accepted standard for assigning homework is 10 minutes times the grade that the student is in per subject and 15 minutes times the grade for reading.

Thus, a kindergartner will have very little homework (less than 10 minutes per subject) if any. A second grader would have 10 X 2 or 20 minutes of math homework but 15 *2 or 30 minutes of reading homework. A seventh grader would have 10 * 7 or 70 minutes (an hour and 10 minutes) of math homework and 15 * 7 or 105 minutes (an hour and 45 minutes) of reading homework. Generally, about 2 hours of homework a night for high school students in total is the most effective level of homework (Marzano and Pickering, 2007). Younger grades should have proportionately less.

So, at the Renaissance Preparatory Academy, you will typically see the following types and levels of homework. We generally assign 30 minutes of reading (either out loud or silent sustained) each night for all students at the Primary level and above. This should be focused reading and a log of how much is being read should be kept. If a student is not able to recount what happened in the work read at home, an additional element of requiring a sentence per chapter on the most important thing in the chapter may accompany this assignment. Our goal is to enable our students to read rapidly with retention of the information being read.

Other topical homework is assigned under the following conditions; 1) the student has a theme unit assignment or deliverable that is best accomplished at home (i.e. following a recipe and cooking cooking something with their parents help). 2) the student has a theme unit assignment that requires a research paper and some of the research or the writing of the report is done outside of class hours. 3) The student has not mastered something (done it quickly and correctly in class) and needs extra work to improve speed of accurate

completion. This may range from reading a paragraph and identifying key points of information in a short amount of time to correctly writing the answers to a series of multiplication facts to telling time confidently. We take that mastery approach so that students may be confident in the results of their work. 4) Students did not remain focused on their school work in class and need more time to complete it. In such a case, parents may be asked to record the amount of time that the student took to complete the work at home and what, if any, distractions interfered.

We ask that parents provide a homework completion environment that fits their child’s needs. Some children require a quiet environment in which to read and remember the topics of learning. Some children can do it at the pool side and tune out distractions. Ideally, the parent knows the child and can help shape that environment for them. We ask that the parent does not do the work for the child.  Asking questions to help a child see how to address a problem is appropriate; while, actually dictating an answer is not.

IDEALLY, the only homework each evening that your child will have will be the minimum of 30 minutes of reading with retention of information (whether a book of their choice or an assigned one). We strive hard to help your child learn the focus and persistence needed to complete most required work within our longer school day. HOWEVER, when homework is assigned, please be sure that your child has turned it in by the next morning or by a given deadline.  We’ll try to highlight it on the top of the assignment. Homework turned in late will be graded down for the missed deadline. Life skills like being on time are also a part of our curriculum. Do watch for the occasional theme unit homework. This may be assigned over a weekend or break when it requires more time than a single night’s work. If that happens, we will not assign homework on other nights.

Finally, we do not view homework as punishment or busy work.  Children benefit from more time spent on a topic and that is why we have a longer school day. However, if a child is working on other skills as well such as focusing on work, being organized, or persisting when something is hard (remember, we want children to do challenging things well), homework may be the result. Furthermore, if a child is still mastering a topic and cannot complete short review quizzes in class in a timely fashion to our standards, homework may result. Not a punishment, but a way to recover what otherwise would be a missed educational opportunity! We promise to not overload your child but to ensure that your child does sufficient work to master the topic and be confident in their ability!
Janice Black, Founder and Director of the School Board

Can you say the same for your child’s current environment?
Our parents can and do!

Today’s public school’s educational environment in South Carolina has been judged to be the next to last nationwide for teachers… The biggest reason why? The percent of teachers who have reported being threatened by students (Wilson, 2017)! If teachers feel threatened, what does that mean for your child in that same environment? Teachers leave the public school due to a wide range of issues which include lack of time to actually prepare and grade the large sized classes and high levels of disrespect both inside and outside of the classroom. This does not mean that South Carolina teachers are not striving and fighting to maintain some minimal standards. South Carolina had average SAT scores slightly above the national average (Bowers, 2017). Teachers, though, are failing to return to that environment and many leave education. Again, how do you think this impacts your child? Don't wait to make a difference in your child's education, take action now!

Those of you who have been following the school know that theme units are an integral part of all our classes from the PrePrimary to the Grammar class. The first major unit in our fall term has been a study of PETS. The PrePrimary has a great picture book about a pet goldfish whose “stuff” overflowed his bowl. The Primary and Elementary classes read about choosing a pet and considered the costs associated with that. The Grammar school focuses on the pet industry and the impact that has for good and bad in our communities. Amidst all of this, the faculty and staff decided that it would be a good idea to get a school pet. They defaulted to fish and our new friend, Orange Juice, is the result. The aquarium was set up on Friday and Orange Juice entered his (or her) new home on Monday. Students are now researching a pet of their choice. Their big expo on pets is on this upcoming Friday afternoon. Can't wait to see what they come up with!

Janice Black, Founder & Director of School Board

Call for an appointment today... 843-800-0590! Schedule an appointment via email using Renaissance.Headmaster@gmail.com.

Janice Black, Founder and Chair of the School Board