South Bend charter network cuts ribbon on career-focused elementary school
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Officials with the Career Academy network of charter schools cut the ribbon on a new K-5 school in South Bend on Thursday.
It comes with a somewhat novel model in education, seeking to expose the youngest students to careers and workforce opportunities at least once a week.
“Our students are going to be learning from professionals, businesses, all of our community,” Principal Brie Childs said. “This gives them an opportunity to explore things that they don’t typically explore in the four walls of a classroom.”
The Career Academy network – which currently operates an elementary school and middle/high school on South Bend’s west side – is partnering with the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Joseph County to open its latest elementary school in their existing O.C. Carmichael Jr. Youth Center. They’re calling the school Success Academy at Boys & Girls Club and are enrolling students now for the coming academic year.
In school officials’ envisioned model, students will attend class teaching foundational academic skills four days a week at the O.C. Carmichael Center, just southeast of downtown South Bend. On the fifth day, school officials say, students will participate in experiential learning through visits to local businesses and conversations with guest speakers.
Brie Childs explains the new model being developed for Career Academy’s new elementary school.
School leaders say it’s all a part of an effort to expose kids at an early age not only to different career paths, but also to the soft skills they’ll need to be successful as they grow older.
“It’s not just about career orientation, it’s about knowing themselves,” Career Academy Superintendent Jeremy Lugbill said. “It’s about identifying their interests, their passions, their strengths and connecting that then to the skill sets that are needed for to be an architect, to be a doctor, to be a lawyer, to be a teacher, to be working in the nonprofit sector.”
Success Academy at Boys and Girls Club will begin small, with no more than 150 students in its first year, and is a pilot, officials say, as educators explore the new model.
The new school is expected to open in August following a $2.5 million renovation to the Boys and Girls Clubs’ O.C. Carmichael Center.
The upgraded youth center features reconfigured classroom space, an art studio, a modernized gymnasium and a makerspace complete with 3-D printers and computer programming activities. The renovations are being paid for through a mix of private bonds and grant support from local organizations like The Garatoni Smith Family Foundation and the Leighton Foundation. Businessman Larry Garatoni is a Career Academy co-founder and sits on the board of the local charter school network.
School leaders say the network has partnerships with organizations in the education space, like IU South Bend, Notre Dame, Goshen College and the St. Joseph County Public Library, as well as other companies, like Roseland Animal Hospital, General Stamping & Metalworks, Beacon Health and Honeywell.
Some have expressed skepticism about the proposed model, asking whether it’s too early to introduce specific career paths and wondering whether it makes sense for young kids to visit highly skilled and technical businesses and trades.
Career Academy leaders say their activities will be age appropriate and are not intended to lock students into a specific career path but rather to provide exposure so that students can begin to understand and develop their own interests.
A group of second graders, for example, might visit a local Growing Kids Learning Center preschool to meet with younger kids and develop ideas for a new toy. Childs said the Success Academy students could then design and build that toy back in the makerspace at their school and donate it to kids at a local hospital.
Career Academy Superintendent Jeremy Lugbill talks about career exposure.
Other ideas include visits to the Potawatomi Zoo, Pure Green Farms and a ride on South Bend’s Transpo bus service as kindergarten students learn about shapes and reconstructing objects they see in the city.
“The amount of learning that our kids are going to have is just limitless,” Childs said.
The Boys & Girls Clubs will still offer after-school programming at the O.C. Carmichael Center in partnership with area school districts. Amenities like the new art studio and makerspace brought in with Success Academy support will be available to Club kids from other schools.
Jacqueline Kronk, CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Joseph County, says the partnership makes opportunities accessible to kids who may never have had the exposure to hand-on learning if not for the clubs. Fifteen percent of kids visiting the youth center before its closure for renovations were homeless, Kronk said.
The partnership also puts to use valuable space in the Boys and Girls Clubs’ O.C. Carmichael Center that sat empty while club members were off at school.
“When we looked at this building, we realized from the hours of 6 to 3, it sat empty and that’s a waste of a community resource,” Kronk said during the school’s ribbon cutting Thursday. “And, it’s through this partnership, through this renovation that we were able to serve an additional hundred kids in the afternoon and add before car, so this building will go utilized from 6:30 in the morning all the way till 10 p.m. at night, and that’s how it should be used – to max capacity.”
The new Success Academy at Boys and Girls Club comes as both organizations have experienced rapid growth in recent years. The Boys and Girls Clubs have more than doubled their reach in the years following COVID-19 with the introduction of new learning recovery programs supported by pandemic relief funds.
And, the Career Academy network is opening another new school this fall – the Portage School of Leaders – in downtown South Bend. Career Academy leaders announced their plans for the new high school the same week South Bend Community school leaders took their first formal steps toward closing one of the traditional public district’s four high schools following years of declining enrollment.
A third charter school will also open this year in South Bend. Indianapolis-based Paramount Schools of Excellence will open its first area K-8 school in August.