Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 7/9/2015
SPRINGFIELD – The city’s newest charter school will open at its permanent location on Roosevelt Avenue this fall.
On July 1, the staff and administration of Baystate Academy Charter School, which operated its first two years at the former Our Lady of the Rosary Church on Franklin Street, showed parents and children the school’s new home in the former U.S. Envelope building.
The first floor is being converted into classrooms with the former lobby transformed into a library and media center. The school currently has grades six through nine and intends to add a new grade each year. It expects to graduate its first class of seniors in 2019.
As Dr. Frank Robinson, the school’s board president, explained the school grew out of the Baystate Health Springfield Educational Partnership, which had been providing afterschool programs to help students consider a career in the health profession.
Timothy Sneed, the school’s executive director, said the idea for the school was conceived 10 years ago as part of an effort for greater workforce development.
“Parents are always looking for alternatives,” he said.
The school opened in 2013 with the sixth and the seventh grades and will have 320 students this fall, Sneed said. When all of the grades are added, the school will have a student body of 560.
Finding and converting a permanent home for the school has been a two-year process, Sneed added. He expects to expand the school through the building over time.
He described the school has having “a rigorous academic program accompanied by workplace opportunities.”
The school operates it classes Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. with Saturday classes from 9 a.m. to noon in which students receive “three hours of individual and small group tutorial instruction in mathematics and English language arts, according to a brochure about the school. It also offers a five-week summer school for students who need additional help.
The school is funded through Department of Education funds that come to Springfield and are deducted from the Springfield School Department’s budget, Sneed said.
Dr. Mark Keroack, the president and CEO of Baystate Health, told Reminder Publications the school is an effort to address shortages of trained personnel in the local workforce.
“Students in Springfield deserve a top notch education, and Baystate Academy is helping to make that possible. We’re very proud to have Baystate Academy bringing a rigorous college prep curriculum to our children that emphasizes excellence in science and math,” Robinson, who is also Baystate Health’s vice president of Community Relations and Public Health, said.
For more information about the school go to www.bacps.net.