
A Latina student starting ninth grade at La Academia has nearly three times the chance to graduate from high school and sixteen the times the chance of going to college compared to her public school counterparts
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La Academia is a 7-12 grade private school serving 75 students from low-income families. Our goal is to motivate and educate middle and high school students who have been expelled, have dropped out or are at risk for dropping out of school.
Our Adult Night School assists an additional 25 students who earn their high school diploma or prepare for the G.E.D. test.
DICP’s community is comprised mostly of Latino families with an average family income of less than $15,000 a year where 98% of La Academia students qualify for the Federal School Lunch Program. Less than half of the adults in our community have a high school education. Our hope is to help these students break familial cycles of academic failure and to help them achieve academic competency and success – in the end also affecting the educational dynamic of this community.
La Academia offers a challenging curriculum, substantially utilizing the Colorado Department of Education state standards, and gives teachers the flexibility to be creative in their teaching.The curriculum focuses on core classes emphasizing reading, language arts, math, science, and social studies. Additionally, we offer a broad array of elective courses, several of which connect our students to community resources; recent elective courses include: mock trial, newspaper, karate, credit recovery, aviation, decades of the 20th century, theatre with Su Teatro, and capoeira with Studio Bahia.
La Academia serves Denver’s Latino youth by promoting quality education, creating and implementing multiple routes for graduating, and promoting higher education for all students. La Academia encourages every student to become productive members of the workforce, to provide their younger peers with role models and hope for their own success, and ultimately to provide for a better quality of life for the community as a whole.
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