School overview and timeline

The foremost goal of the Julia Zaluzny Education Foundation at this time is the creation of a private boarding school for grades 9-12. This school will focus on experiential education, bringing together community involvement and service, a strong work program, and a rigorous, flexible academic curriculum.

We hope to enroll approximately 300 students, distributed roughly evenly across the four grades. Attracting students from many different regions of the U.S. and other countries will aid greatly in connecting our school to the world community, and give our students an exposure to worldviews they may not have encountered before.

The most important qualities we will be looking for in our students are dedication and involvement. We wish to engender in our students a genuine desire to learn, to understand the local and global communities, and to become better people.

Approximately fifty faculty and thirty full-time staff members will serve to educate and support our students. This low student-to-faculty ratio will allow teachers to provide feedback more detailedthan the traditional A-F grading scheme. Instead of using a standard academic calendar, faculty members will be employed for the entire year - summer provides an excellent opportunity for course design, workshops, and professional development. We want our school's practices to be well-grounded in educational research; therefore, we must give our teachers the time and resources to examine such research.

While our plans for the school's schedule and curriculum are not set in stone, there are some things we have "penciled in" at this point. The school year will consist of Fall and Spring semesters, with a four-week-long Winter term covering the month of January. Regular courses will be taught in Fall and Spring (with some lasting through both). Winter term will present two different options for our students: Those who have succeeded admirably at their courses will have the opportunity to take short courses, on topics more practical or esoteric than those seen during the regular terms. Those whose progress is lagging will be able to take remedial courses, so that they need not fall behind or retake courses in order to achieve their goals.

Despite the school's departure from traditional grading, students will still face both oral and written examinations. Feedback and suggestions for improvement will be emphasized over numerical or letter grades. With an average class size of about 18 students, there will be ample opportunity for students to present their work for the entire class to see. We anticipate having a relatively small core of required courses, but providing no "fluff" courses - students will find that, whatever direction they choose to go, they will be working just as hard or harder than they would in a required course.

A student's Junior and Senior years provide an opportunity to specialize. Those students whose interest leans in a particular direction will have the opportunity to declare a "major," which opens up certain high-level courses and requirement to them. Major students will take advanced courses in their area of specialization, complete an internship related to their major, and complete a capstone project that demonstrates their facility in this topic. Choosing a major is not required; we anticipate that some students may prefer to be generalists, and others will not find an area that interests them until college (or even later in life). Non-major students will find other opportunities available to them, such as a greater involvement in the school's community service program. We believe that there is value in making a choice and seeing it through, and the major program may give students a better idea of what they want to do (or avoid) when they reach college.

At this time there are many aspects of the school still under development, and many areas in which others can help us refine our ideas. There are also certain particulars of our school that we have intentionally left unresolved, such as its name and location. We feel that deciding upon these prematurely would be a mistake; the location will depend on a careful examination of state-by-state education laws, and the name may well be determined by a particularly generous donor. Our attention now is on designing the substance of the school itself, and other concerns, important though they may be, will have to wait.

The following is our rough timeline for the creation of the school: