Ingenuity Prep

Ingenuity Prep public charter school is a supportive community dedicated to academic rigor and civic leadership, preparing students for the path to the colleges and careers of their choosing. With this aim, the charter school opened in Washington, dc, in august of 2013 and has expanded to now serve over 800 students in preschool through 8th grade and has a staff of more than 150. Ingenuity Prep is organized into three academies: early childhood academy (serving grades preschool through kindergarten), elementary school academy (serving grades 1 through 4), and middle school academy (serving grades 5 through 8). We prepare our students for success in college and in life. We set high standards and strive to cultivate a love of learning in every student. We are a place where students can learn, establish deep relationships and prepare to become impactful civic leaders. The cornerstones of Ingenuity Prep's program are: rigorous content and individualized instruction - we start by setting high academic standards for our students, and creating the circumstances for them to achieve academic excellence. We believe that the best way to do this is by leveraging a robust curriculum and consistently delivering well-planned, high-quality lessons. We are able to accomplish our goals by being responsive to student data, maintaining low teacher-to-student ratios so that students are always getting personalized and small group learning, enabling teacher content specialization as early as kindergarten so that our teachers are true experts in the subjects they teach, and intentionally leveraging technology to even further personalize and accelerate student learning. Civic leadership - we believe that academic excellence - while very important - is not sufficient to prepare students for the demands of 21st century leadership. Building civic leaders is core to our mission. We want to equip students to pursue their passions and be empowered to think, speak, and act positively on behalf of themselves, their community, the country, and the world. Beginning in pre-k, civic leadership class time and activities are intentionally built into our schedule. In our early grades, we focus on social-emotional instruction so that students build skills in empathy, resilience, and self-advocacy. As our students get older, we continue to build on social-emotional skills while also having students engage with specific social justice issues and providing them with opportunities to engage with those issues in their community. For example, when our 4th graders learned about our food desert in ward 8, they planned a food drive and delivered the proceeds to local food banks. Enrichment - we provide daily opportunities for students to pursue interest areas outside of traditional academics. Our enrichment programs start in pre-k with art and physical education and build throughout the course of elementary and middle school where we add music and expanded science and social studies classes. Enrichments are opportunities for students to build knowledge in areas of passion, which in turn fuel motivation and foster growth mindset. We believe strong enrichment supports student growth and motivation across all parts of the school experience. In addition to the core components of our day-to-day program, themes of community, relationships, and equity of access run through every part of our school. These principles are core to our school's identity: community and relationships - community and relationships are integral parts of academic and personal development. Our teachers take time to build meaningful connections with students, working intentionally to get to know them as people. We also hold up families as critical members of our school community. We believe in cultivating them as partners and providing them with tools and resources to support students to meet their goals and realize their dreams. Further, we work intentionally to support students to build their own community at school through social- emotional learning activities and restorative practice to support communicating communally with and to anyone in the Ingenuity Prep community. Last, but not least, we are committed, active participants in our ward 8 community. Equity of access - there is still too large a divide in our country between the educational opportunities of students from different communities and backgrounds. At Ingenuity Prep we strive to provide the southeast dc community with a school that levels the educational playing field for its students, providing them with high quality instruction and rich educational opportunities, equipping them to succeed at the same high levels as other students in the us and in other countries.