Foundation Academy at a Glance

Foundation Academy is a free, public, academically demanding college preparatory middle school, serving students from a cross section of the City of Trenton. We welcomed our inaugural classes of 40 fifth and 40 sixth graders in August of 2007. Each year, we will be adding a new grade level with 40 students until we reach a capacity of 160 students in grades 5 through 8.

The mission of Foundation Academy is to ensure that all of our students secure the academic knowledge and skills to prepare them for the nation’s finest high schools and colleges, and to instill in them the core values of caring, respect, responsibility and honesty.

Foundation Academy’s program has seven key elements. They are:

1. High and Clear Expectations
2. More Time on Task
3. Rewards and Consequences
4. Values
5. Results Driven
6. Focus on Adolescents
7. Building Community

High and Clear Expectations

• We base our curriculum on the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards (NJCCS).
• We test our students regularly on their progress towards the standards.
• We give parents quarterly course syllabi that outline the skills and knowledge their children will be learning in each subject during each 12-week period of school.
• We use standarized classroom structures and daily learning objectives throughout the school so students know at every moment what they are supposed to be learning and how it relates to what they learned previously.
• We use a set of common behavioral expectations and enforce them from the first day of the school year to the last.
• We require students to wear school uniforms.

More Time on Task

• We have a longer school day - from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm.
• We have a longer school year - 200 days, including a mandatory three-week summer session.
• We focus on Language Arts and Mathematics skills by teaching these subjects more minutes each week than in most schools.
• We use block scheduling to provide for better use of the time in the classroom.
• We quickly identify when students are not being successful, and we take immediate steps to use all of our available time and resources to get students on track.

Rewards and Consequences

• We reward positive academic and social behavior and impose discipline when a student's conduct detracts from learning or is inconsistent with our core values.
• We recognize students' character, learning, attendance, punctuality, knowledge and improvement on a daily basis.
• We give our students weekly "paychecks" that measure their contributions to the academic and social life of our school. Students are required to get their parents to sign these paychecks before they may use them to purchase items in our school store, attend social events and participate in several special out-of-school and overnight trips.
• We have an honor roll, an academic Hall of Fame, and members-only "status cards" to reward students for academic and social success.
• We place students who are disruptive in class on the "bench", an in-class time out.
• We deny privileges to students who do not do homework, do not wear their school uniform properly, or fail to meet any of our other expectations.
• We quickly, consistently and without hesitation impose increasing discipline for any student who presents consistent or bigger challenges.

Values

• We unapologetically focus on our core values - caring, respect, responsibility and honesty.
• We reinforce our values with the names of the student teams.
• We provide daily lessons in character education.
• We expect our students to apologize to the entire community if they violate one of our core values.
• We recite our core values on a daily basis.

Results Driven

• We are relentlessly focused on preparing our students to succeed on state tests as well as in college.
• We give parents Progress Reports every 23 days and Report Cards every 12 weeks.

Focus on Adolescents

• We focus on the needs of young adolescents by teaching to their particular learning styles.
• We are crystal clear about our academic and social expectations, and we are consistent in the way we communicate our expectations to students.
• We help parents to better understand and work through the challenges of this age group.
• We employ proven teaching techniques that use motivating drills and chants.
• We are proven, experienced educators, many of whom have worked with middle school students in Trenton for several years.
• We are eager to work with urban adolescents.
• We constantly search for and use best practices from the finest urban schools throughout the country.

Building Community

• We meet each morning as an entire school community in Circle.
• We motivate students through a call-response, during which students affirm our values and prepare to start each day.
• We identify students as members of teams, not "homerooms", and these teams carry the names of different human values our students will learn and embrace.
• We expect the entire school community to together tidy up our school at the end of each day.
• We require students to perform community service and participate in co-curricular activities.