Pride Academy Wins EPIC Award

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.