Private charter school to
open in Alpine
By Lori Bledsoe
For The Alpine Sun
ALPINE — Alpine Academy is a newly announced public school facility that will offer middle school and high school classes to the students of Alpine. This academy is a part of the Julian Charter School, which has been in operation for the last eight years and has just recently started branching out by offering community classrooms, such as the Pine Valley Academy, which opened last year.
Audra Hall, the director of the Pine Valley Academy, is excited about the upcoming Alpine Academy and said that this is a viable resource for the parents of Alpine students. Hall states, “It is all about choice and what’s best for the kids,” Hall said. She said that AUSD already offers an excellent middle school in JMMS, and said she believes most of the academy’s students will be drawn from among high school students. That is one of the major reasons JCS chose Alpine as the next site for a new academy, she said.
Hall states, “Many of our students and some of our teachers are from Alpine and have expressed the need for this.”
The Alpine Academy will give another choice to Alpine families of high school students. For years, Alpine has been struggling to get a high school built.
However, even if a site were to be chosen from among the 12 under review and approved tomorrow, the community would still have a long wait for
construction to be completed.
During that waiting period, students will continue to commute over an hour each day to school at one of GUHSD’s high school facilities. The long commutes coupled with the rising fuel costs lend an attractive light to this new academy.
Although Julian Charter School is primarily a home school educational option, all participating teachers are credentialed and “No Child Left Behind” compliant.
JCS has taken its academy approach one step further with the Alpine Academy by adding on-site classes Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., making it more of a hybrid home-schooling facility.
The academy, which will be housed in the old Mirror Off-set Printing Building, has been busy renovating and restructuring the building to meet code, and to present core curriculum to seventh, eighth, and ninth graders Monday and Wednesday, and to 10th, 11th, and 12th graders Tuesday and Thursday. Elective courses, such as music, will be scheduled throughout the week, but mostly on Fridays.
The academy will also offer social events to students, as well. This past year, Pine Valley Academy, formerly a charter school formed under the auspices of Mountain Empire Unified School District, hosted a Halloween dance, a turkey dinner, and a Valentine’s Day dance held in the Pine Valley Clubhouse.
Along with the social events, the Alpine Academy will have an ASB, and a PTO (instead of a PTA).
Field trips are also a big part of the academy’s plan. This year, the Pine Valley Academy went Whale Watching in the San Diego Bay and had a few musical excursions down to Balboa Park. They visited Deering Banjo Company to see how banjos are made, and participated in the Julian Charter School Talent Show, presented at the Joan Croc Center.
To accommodate field trips and outside learning opportunities, each student is given an allowance. These allowances cover the costs of field trips that a student would like to take to enrich his/her current lessons or to enroll in physical education opportunities such as dance or fitness training at a local gym.
An informative meeting was presented by the director of Julian Charter Schools, Jennifer Cauzza at the Alpine Community Center on Wednesday night.
Residents who were unable to attend, may contact Hall at 473-1300.
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