Open Enrollment Ends July 1
(or until we have reached capacity).
The Language and Literacy Academy for Learning provides an educational and therapeutic model of service delivery to students with disabilities. Our mission is to conceptualize each student’s educational pathway where learning is a dynamic process of functioning and disability. We provide an alternative approach to education which will provide choice and opportunity for families to experience a setting where staff are ready to embrace their child’s exceptionality. The Language and Literacy Academy for Learning uses highly effective teachers, therapists, and staff to reduce the functional limitations of each child’s health condition, environmental factors, and personal factors to accelerate growth in core subject areas and reduce barriers that impede student success. We are working with the Polk County School Board to improve social and emotional development among students with disabilities, to close the achievement gap while improving behavior, and to prepare our students for higher education and /or employment.
We serve infants (12 months to 18 months, toddlers (18 months to 36 months), pre- kindergarten (3-5 years old), K-5th grade (Elementary School), 6-8th grade (Middle School), and students with severe cognitive impairments from K-12th grades (Supportive/Participatory and InD classrooms). Each will have an identified disability with an individualized treatment plan. To overcome past approaches of describing or labeling disabilities, the Language and Literacy Academy for Learning will employ a unique program design that prioritizes the limitations of the disability and its effect on academic success by looking at how the student functions using our Multidimensional System of Functional Supports as a guiding principle.
Given the varying exceptionalities that we serve and due to the complex, dynamic, and unpredictable relationship between the student’s health conditions and functional limitations related to environmental and personal factors, the Language and Literacy Academy for Learning will utilize a highly specialized school-wide behavior system that will provide conditional and unconditional positive reinforcement with clear consequences. The Language and Literacy Academy for Learning program will employ a customized Positive Behavior Supports program, as a major component of our school program delivery system.
The Language and Literacy Academy for Learning serves as a caveat for therapists, namely speech language pathologists and reading specialists, to be intimately involved with building literacy skills by providing extensive language and vocabulary therapy within the classroom. Language arts and reading are incorporated into every aspect of the curriculum, as language and vocabulary will be present in every context. Curricula choices for our students were carefully selected for accelerated growth in reading, math, science, and social studies. We utilize highly innovative, high interest content and materials, and blended instructional approaches that are researched-based and aligned with the Florida State Standards and where necessary, the Florida State Access Points. We wholeheartedly will hold true to the “Every Student Succeeds Act” and hold all administrators, teachers, and staff accountable for strong academic outcomes.
Open Enrollment Ends July 1