Our Mission:
Hillside Academy is an independent school that provides a safe, experiential, and integrated learning environment attentive to individual needs. Hillside's environment empowers children to maximize their potential and to find their places as lifelong learners in school and society. Our school welcomes and encourages the presence and participation of parents in the creation of an active, inventive and congenial environment.
Children have the potential and the possibilities; Hillside Academy provides the opportunities, expectation, and support. Students are challenged to meet their academic potential while developing personal responsibility, self-discipline, empathy, integrity, and respect for others.
Our challenge is to determine how each child learns best. Our goal is to educate meaningfully while nuturing and building trust. Our success is measured by whether, in partnership with parents, we've made the most of an individual's potential based on their strengths and gifts.
Advantages of Hillside Academy vs. Public School
- Low class sizes - 6:1 student to teacher ratio
- Flexible curriculum and student placement
- Emphasis on interests and strengths
- Safer environment
- Curriculum design based on your child
- Your child is not reduced to a test score
- More opportunity for creativity
- High expectation for kind and respectful behavior
- Protective of a child's dignity
- Exciting hands-on, multi-sensory learning opportunities
- Frequent, detailed parent communication
- Active parent involvement
Parents as Partners
Hillside Academy creates a community wherein families and teachers work side-by-side to create a learning environment that meets the needs of the children. Regularly scheduled parent meetings provide opportunities for parents and teachers to reflect on the documentation of the child's learning progress and plan together how to maximize potential. With parents, we discuss ways of extending learning as a community in the classroom and individually at home. Parents and teachers celebrate success, share challenges, and seek collaborative solutions.
Class Size and Structure
We maintain a student-teacher ratio of 6:1, this allows for each student to be addressed individually. Students are grouped in multi-age dyads and have the same teachers by subject. Multi-age grouping allows for greater emotional, intellectual and physical development among the students, allowing opportunities for students to find commonalities and academic challenge. Cross grade dyads encourage cooperative learning and a spirit of community. Parent specialists from their field of expertise support the entire teacher team. The entire staff meets weekly to plan curricula and tailor instruction. This improves creativity and problem solving in ways teachers cannot do when they work in isolation with large classes. It allows us to understand our students as learners at all levels, reviewing research, sharing talents, ideas, methods and strategies to support each individual student.
Measurements
- Flexible Learning Timetables: Education at Hillside Academy is not bound to a rigid timetable. Teacher teams incorporate flexibility per-student into the curriculum. If it takes longer to complete a topic or project, and if a student's interest and level of engagement suggest a need for deeper exploration, we allow ourselves the time needed. As a result, the day flows with time on tasks and subject areas relate to one another naturally. While our days are very structured and disciplined, they also allow for flexibility and time for completion of an idea, thought, or project.
- Authentic Assessment: Letter grades are not given to students, instead teachers write narratives that describe each learner's academic, social, emotional, and physical needs. Goals are assessed and new goals are established for further learning. Evaluations are given to parents twice a year and are derived from ongoing, continuous observations and assessments relative to grade level expectations.
- Portfolio Documentation: The curriculum is designed for the individual student so that it is meaningful and challenging. Documentation of each student's progress in yearly portfolios enables teachers to plan a responsive curriculum. This is not done to compare children, determine placement or inclusion in a program, or to label. It is done to understand and represent individual progress effectively to parents - your child's interest, capability, progress, strengths, type of intelligence and way of learning.
