York Preparatory Academy is helping all students develop the World Class Skills of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate by ensuring that they possess the knowledge, skills, character, and determination to excel in their post secondary pursuits and in life.
Closely related to this, and central to our goals for students, is our Patriot DNA. The Patriot DNA is a 6 strand ideal of traits that we want each graduating student to possess and is directly related to the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate. The inclusion of Critical Thinking, Character, Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, and Choices into our curriculum sequence helps us infuse students with the skills and determination that they will need to be successful in secondary education and in the workforce.
Every teacher from Kindergarten to High School have opportunities to develop instructional skills around these ideals. Weaving them into the instructional day is helping us to better prepare students to be successful and demonstrate growth. Partnering with the deliberate design of instruction to include these skills is the rigorous review of student progress throughout the year. Instructional coaches train weekly on how to design effective ways to gather data, how to better analyze progress data, and how to adjust instruction to support students’ needs as identified using the data. This approach to student progress allows us to keep our attention on the individual student all year long. The use of coaches also allows our teachers the benefit of strong support as they learn the skills that we need them to have.
We are grateful for the families and staff who started our school, those of the community who have continued to work with us, and the people who have stepped up to create a place where school staff and parents can partner to help each child maximize their growth from year to year.
