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About Our School
Alphonsus Academy is a school with a 120-year history of providing Catholic education to students in the Lakeview area. In December of 2002, all parish groups including the Parish Council, the Finance Council, and School Board, decided to go forth with a new name: Alphonsus Academy & Center for the Arts. This change included a new focus on integrating the arts into our core content areas as well as enhancing our parallel art classes. Our goal since then has been to use the arts as a vehicle to create new learning opportunities and enhance existing learning opportunities in order to increase academic achievement for all students.
It is our teachers' dedication and drive that enables us to prepare our students for the future. Our teachers employ the latest teaching strategies and continually reflect on their practices to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms. Teachers spend a portion of their summer time focused on curriculum and assessment planning. This commitment allows AACA to offer a standards-based curriculum that is carefully designed to meet the varying needs of our students. Teachers also meet weekly to engage in professional development and to discuss student progress, ferreting out problems or issues that may be interfering with learning.
AACA has embraced a unique mission to build an arts integrated curriculum complimented by a strong parallel arts class program. A faith-based Catholic education is still central to the AACA story, but our arts focus allows our children to engage in learning experiences that build critical thinking skills and apply those skills to real-life situations. This crossover and transfer of skills is one of the primary reasons for engaging in an art-integrated curriculum approach: students experience higher levels of academic success.
The unique mission of AACA does not overlook tradition. We continue to insist on the highest possible levels of academic achievement and maintain a strong commitment to our traditional extracurricular pursuits in the areas of athletics, clubs, and student government. We have improved the quality of our art, music and dance classes by partnering with professional artists who are enthused about teaching elementary-aged children. Our relationship with the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education continues to guide and support AACA faculty in growing our ability to design and implement curriculum that uses the arts in meaningful ways in math, science, language arts, and social studies. Each year, we look forward to our students and teachers working with artists of all mediums in correlation with their 'regular' content.
Our Preschool is NAEYC-accredited, an honor granted to less than 7% of the schools nationwide. The demand for our Preschool program is so great that in addition to our already popular five-day full and half-day programs, we have added three-day and four day, half-day programs. We are proud of the exceptional quality of preschool education and the experiences our students and parents have as they participate in the many learning opportunities that are encompassed in our preschool programs.
Year after year, our standardized test scores are above the national average. In fact, many of our students score in the top 20% of all students across the nation who takes the Terra Nova Test. And, given that our grading standards are considerably tougher than those of neighboring public schools, our students experience academic success at AACA, as opposed to experiencing failure. Our students regularly attend Chicago's top public and private high schools, due in part to the rigorous academic curriculum they are engaged in as well as the explicit high school readiness curriculum taught in our middle school.
