Overheard at tonight's orientation & BBQ

Scene: Two gangling, smiling boys walking down the hallway together after scoping out the gym at their new school...
"Man, I hope you're in my class this year."
"Yeah, me too. This is going to be fun!" 


Yep, two adolescent boys genuinely happy about returning to school.


Watch for photos from the first day of school (whenever that is...).

What our social services team did on *their* summer vacation

Family Advocates Porchia Wright and Paul Smith with Director of Social Services Ashley Hampton

Domus schools employ the use of social services teams to address complex social and emotional needs youth in our schools often face. The Domus Academy social services team made 35 home visits this summer, a key way to build relationships so kids and families understand our only agenda is their success. That trust is critical when we need a kid in the middle of a meltdown to listen to us, or when we have to have a tough conversation. Home visits also help us learn about a family: All the little things you discover about someone when you sit down over tea in their living room help us understand where a family is coming from so we can be respectful of and better understand their beliefs and experiences. 

It all goes back to a Domus core value: Loving relationships change people. When kids understand we love them, and they trust we have their best interests at heart, they become open to making positive change and know we'll help them make that change. We hope you'll watch that wonderful process unfold this year.

What I did on my summer vacation

Our school staff spent the summer, in addition to doing dozens of home visits to families, working on the tools they need to make sure Domus Academy is a rigorous learning environment with high expectations and a strong school culture. Last year, we were very successful creating trusting individual relationships with students, which helped us move beyond the lack of hope, motivation, and interest we saw in our students—despite their tremendous academic potential.

This year, we want to pair that keen ability to develop relationships with a focus on core values. In fact, we’re spending the first month of school on a school-wide core values unit centered on the names of our students’ homerooms: ICARE (Integrity – Community – Ambition – Respect – Empathy). Each value has associated with it three to five tangible behaviors and actions; students will self-report on how they’re doing, and staff will weigh in as well.

Along with this focus on school culture will be an increased focus on guided reading utilizing a new leveled library, providing students with engaging materials at their reading level. Columbia University’s Readers and Writers Workshop, a method of instruction successfully used in schools for over twenty years, is particularly helpful for schools and classrooms with students reading at a variety of levels. Our students will now be able to find many interesting books at their level and. Students practice skills like inference in a classroom setting, with their teacher modeling the skill, then do small-group classroom work, then independent work on their level using the new leveled library to find interesting books at their individual ability. The more they read books on their reading level, the more successfully they’ll build critical skills such as decoding, fluency, and comprehension.

So Year Two, with its luxury of lessons learned from Year One, will bring a tighter school culture with a foundation of key values and a more rigorous learning environment using proven methods from respected institutions. Add to that our intense social/emotional focus, and you have a whole-child approach to educating youth.

Domus Academy makes the cover of Yale Magazine

Did you see this spring 2011 story about the kids of Domus Academy? Molly Hensley-Clancy does an outstanding job putting the reader right there in the school hallway to experience the challenges facing our students as well as the issues our staff members must overcome. And don't miss the slideshow.