Focus Initiative

We've had a great first week at Focus Academy. In our first week, we've set up computers, computer software, email accounts and listed out 40 things we each want in life and started on our ways to being the fastest typists in history. We've also had our first music class (learned the A chord on guitar), drama class (did a reading of Illinois Jane - a middle school drama) and a social skills class. We've each emailed our mentor, Ms. Caroline Hamed, our first assignments and we've each begun decorating our display board to personalize our space. All of our students are working steadily through the academic ramp-up phase, and are each at different places in that phase. Most importantly our students have begun to set up and understand a new system of success that will define Focus Academy.

As you'll read on our website, we claim to be completely unique in that we not only, prepare our students for academic success through highschool and college, but more importantly, we prepare them for life success. We feel very strongly that this is the reason Focus Academy exists. If there was another school that made this their goal and succeeded, I would see no reason to continue to open our doors.

We started our first day by creating the rules that we will live by in our classroom for the rest of our school year. The students created their behavioral rules and I created their academic rules. Does anyone remember their parents saying, (annoyingly at times) "If you don't work; you don't eat." If there was a principle they were trying to teach you, it was, "The kind of life you want isn't handed to you; you're going to have to work (for and with other people) to get what you want." This is the most basic principle we build into our daily system and we take great pains to structure our Focus system in such a way that it mimics life. One of the first life lessons we enforce is that you don't leave at the end of the day until your work is finished. This week everyone worked very hard to earn their tickets so they could leave at three- thirty.