School bells are ringing in Hamilton County, and if you and your high school student are ready for a different kind of classroom, there is still time to enroll at Ivy Academy. Ivy Academy is a non-tuition based charter school adjacent to 4,000 acres of North Chickamauga Creek Preserve with outdoor classrooms, open enrollment to all Hamilton County Schools, and offers a different approach to how the core subjects are taught.
Executive Director Angie Markum is a native of the area and has a deep love of the outdoors and education. Markum started out in public education teaching mathematics in Hamilton County in 1985, took a few years off to start her family, and returned to education a couple of years ago in teaching public education at both charter schools in town, CGLA in 2009 and starting with Ivy Academy last year.
Markum says she returned to education at a charter school because, although she saw so many teachers and administrators doing a top-notch job and taking their job seriously, she realized the model of public education is old and leaves room for improvement.
“If you’ve got 30 kids in a classroom who are not all from two parent homes or from homes that don’t value education, it’s hard. It’s not like it was in the ’50s, ’60s or even ’70s. Not that what’s there is bad, but it can be improved, and charter schools do that,” Markum says. Charter schools are designed and run by teachers, have a smaller class size (a max of 15 at Ivy Academy), and don’t have a lot of bureaucracy common in public school systems that inhibit implementing some teacher’s ideas.
Markum also specifically chose Ivy because of their outdoor element. She says the outdoors are full of valuable natural resources that need to be taught to the next generation. “It’s very disheartening to me that kids, in Hamilton County know the name of every Disney character more than they know the name of a tree,” she says. “That just shouldn’t be, because this is such a beautiful area and we have so many wonderful, natural resources. Unless we educate people about that, they are not going to value it.”
At Ivy, the teachers focus on getting students used to the outdoors and educating them in such a way that they make the real world the classroom. Classes do several project based lessons around this idea, such as last year’s project where students studied a large fish kill in North Chickamauga that was attributed to downpour of rain and acid runoff from old coal mines.
Teachers took students to the area where they filled potato sacks with limestone gravel that was put at the mouth of the old coalmines to make the water alkaline.
“Although you can learn about alkaline and acids in the classroom, when you go do that and it’s hands-on, you remember it and own it,” Markum says. “It’s very different from the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., day with kids inside all day. We do hour-long hikes once a week around the 4,000-acre property to places like Pride Rock and the Blue Hole. It’s a shame that we’ve let it get this far and people are so divorced from the land that we live on and our region is known for.”
Ivy also integrates their subjects in with themes they have every year so the students can see the relationship between subjects. Ivy started their first year with one grade, 9th grade. Last year, they added 10th grade, and this year, they added 11th grade. With 60 to 90 students in each grade, they would like to have between 220 and 240 students there, she says. There is still room for 50 students for this school year, which begins on August 29. Students can register online at www.ivyacademychattanooga.com.
Because of the confusion surrounding charter schools, Markum explains them further. Charter schools are not zoned schools and are governed by their own board. As a public school, they receive per capita allotment funding from taxpayer dollars. “State legislatures realized a couple of years back that we can improve public education, and could be innovative about how to do it, and they created the charter school model,” she says. “The general thought is smaller and closer accountability, and we can have quicker results.”
Charter schools received a boost when Gov. Haslam signed a bill this summer allowing any student to attend a charter school, and not just failing students, or economically disadvantaged students, or those in a failing school. Ivy’s goal this year is that each individual student’s needs will be focused on and met, Markum says. The school wide goals are to have electives that are going to target needy areas. They also have already planned a project for this year to remove an environmental hazard from the community, research why that item has a negative impact on the environment, see what it takes to remove it and what the benefits are to remove it.
Ivy is currently seeking more community support as well as involving themselves in the community more. They are working on a site plan that would provide permanent structures and innovative buildings such as green buildings to the campus. All in all, they are working toward shedding light on a different kind of classroom that connects students to their environment and aids their physical and mental growth.