Pride Academy recently received an Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) Silver Gains Award for Driving Dramatic Student Achievement Gains. Pride Academy faculty members received the award
from the New Leaders organization
in recognition of the school's impact on students and to assist the school in sharing information about their practices with other schools.
Pride Academy was the only school in New Jersey and one of only 14 charter schools from across the country to be honored by the New Leaders’ Effective
Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) program for driving the highest student achievement gains.
On receiving the EPIC Award, Pride Academy’s Principal, Mrs. Thomas, said: “We are proud of our
entire school community and grateful to New Leaders for providing an opportunity to recognize the hard work, effort, and
determination of our students and teachers and for providing access to a rich professional development system of resources
and expertise that will continue to support and build our dedicated community of learners. Our teachers and administrators
purposefully create and cause the circumstances and rigorous learning culture where critical thinking, questioning, problem
solving, and decision making count in impacting lives and shaping futures. We regard this EPIC Award as a tribute honoring
our entire school wide community and our collective mission of empowerment in scholarship, leadership, and service.”
This year, 179 charter schools from 24 states and the District of Columbia competed in the EPIC National Charter School
Consortium for $1.1 million in incentive funds. EPIC award winners are selected solely based on growth made over the
previous three years in student state test scores.
Learning from Effective Practices
The power of EPIC lies in the opportunity for educators to learn from one another about the effective practices that
contribute to student achievement gains. All EPIC award-winning schools engage in a thorough investigation with the EPIC
team to study and document the school practices and leadership actions that contributed to their success. Case studies and
profiles from award-winning charter schools will be posted on the EPIC website.
EPIC and New Leaders
New Leaders launched the Effective Practice Incentive Community (EPIC) in 2006 to learn what is working to transform
high need schools and use that knowledge to enhance the New Leaders program and provide professional development
tools for educations nationwide.
The EPIC program operates in partnership with a consortium of charter and public schools across the
country and is funded by
the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF),
New Leaders is a national nonprofit that develops transformational school leaders and promotes the system-level
conditions that allow strong leaders to succeed.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Making History Again at Pride!
NJ Charter School Teacher of the Year!
Mr. Dunn is our second teacher to receive this prestigious recognition. In 2010, Ms Cenac was selected as the NJ Charter School Teacher of the Year.
Mr. Dunn was presented with his award at the Annual NJCSA Conference in Atlantic City on March 27th, 2012. During the award ceremony, Mr. Dunn paid tribute to and honored his Pride colleagues and students and gave an inspiring acceptance speech that showcased his passion for teaching and learning.
This is an excellent tribute to Mr. Dunn’s as well as a representation to the strong professional learning community that we continue to build here at Pride Academy.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Coming Together to Build a Dream
For over a year now, our Parent Council has been steadily working towards the dream of building a playground for our students. In a little over a year, they have raised $1,600!
Their hard work and dedication put Pride Academy in the perfect position for an amazing opportunity that recently became available to us. About four weeks ago, we were contacted by KaBOOM, a non-profit organization that connects corporate sponsors with great schools and organizations who need playgrounds.
Since then, it’s been full-steam ahead! The whole community has rallied to complete the application, sign petitions, attend interviews, and raise the remaining $7,000 needed to earn the grant and get our playground built. Our coupon book fundraiser was a great success, bringing in over $2,000. To date, we are about $4,000 short of our goal.
This week, we will launch our next big fundraiser. We will be hosting a “FUN-A-THON”, where all Pride students will be challenged to get sponsors for either jumping rope, hula-hooping, or dribbling a basketball. Families and friends will be asked to pledge flat donations or donations per minute of “FUN”. The fundraiser will culminate with a community celebration called “An Indoor Playground for Our Outdoor Dream” on Saturday, March 10th. Our common room will be converted into an indoor park, where students will jump, hula-hoop, and dribble basketball to meet their pledge requirements. Our indoor park will have hot dog stands, Italian ices, and more for sale, with profits going to the playground fund.
We look forward to your support in order to make this a successful community celebration to help us raise the funds we need and create a fun event for the whole Pride Academy family.
By Ms Dumenigo
Sunday, February 12, 2012
GRIT = RESULTS
Last year, we worked with parents and students on defining EFFORT and we spoke about RESILIENCE and student capacity to stay determined and not give up because the work is hard or the answer to the problem is not immediate.
This year, we are working with students to track and use their assessment data to help them to set goals and create action plans for continued growth towards meeting their goals.
As a school community, we are now ready to talk about levels of HIGH EFFORT and PERSISTENCE, ideas that are captured in the word, GRIT.
During one of our Professional Development workshops last month, Steve Barkley, a master teacher consultant who has been working with us at Pride for the past 3 years, shared some important ideas that will help to propel our push for higher levels of student achievement and the development of our students as independent critical thinkers.
Mr. Barkley shared the work of an author, Martin Seligman, who writes in his book, “Flourish” , about the importance of self-discipline in academic success. He states that the “ultimate self-discipline character is GRIT… the never-yielding form of self- discipline, an extreme persistence that produces very high effort….
The more GRIT you have, the more time you spend on the task, and all those hours don’t just add to whatever innate skill you have: they multiply your progress to the goal.”(Seligman, 2011).
Mr. Barkley challenged us as teachers and leaders to think about what we need to do to increase student self–discipline and build GRIT:
We are excited about this next step in our thinking and action as a school community and we would like to invite parents and community members to join us as we begin our focus. We need you more than ever as partners in our continual evolution as a high performing school. We need your help to identify family and community actions that will support our mutual work in ensuring that our students continue to build their skills as powerful thinkers and problem solvers.
Please reach out to Mrs. Thomas, Ms Dumenigo or Ms Cenac if you are interested in sharing your ideas and time to work on our GRIT Initiative.
This year, we are working with students to track and use their assessment data to help them to set goals and create action plans for continued growth towards meeting their goals. As a school community, we are now ready to talk about levels of HIGH EFFORT and PERSISTENCE, ideas that are captured in the word, GRIT.
During one of our Professional Development workshops last month, Steve Barkley, a master teacher consultant who has been working with us at Pride for the past 3 years, shared some important ideas that will help to propel our push for higher levels of student achievement and the development of our students as independent critical thinkers.
Mr. Barkley shared the work of an author, Martin Seligman, who writes in his book, “Flourish” , about the importance of self-discipline in academic success. He states that the “ultimate self-discipline character is GRIT… the never-yielding form of self- discipline, an extreme persistence that produces very high effort….
The more GRIT you have, the more time you spend on the task, and all those hours don’t just add to whatever innate skill you have: they multiply your progress to the goal.”(Seligman, 2011).
Mr. Barkley challenged us as teachers and leaders to think about what we need to do to increase student self–discipline and build GRIT:
- What kind of self–discipline will create the student achievement that we seek?
- What changes do we need to make in the rigor of our teaching to move students from “just doing what is necessary to pass or complete the assignment, or get an “A” to students setting goals and practicing identifying and committing to “what it takes to achieve it”. (Barkley 2012)
We are excited about this next step in our thinking and action as a school community and we would like to invite parents and community members to join us as we begin our focus. We need you more than ever as partners in our continual evolution as a high performing school. We need your help to identify family and community actions that will support our mutual work in ensuring that our students continue to build their skills as powerful thinkers and problem solvers.
Please reach out to Mrs. Thomas, Ms Dumenigo or Ms Cenac if you are interested in sharing your ideas and time to work on our GRIT Initiative.
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