Independent school grows during first year

The private school already has moved to a new, larger location, and enrollment is on the upswing.

Joanie Brown, who earned a master of education at Drury University, joined the school as its director in August, when the school was housed at Calvary Temple, 444 W Grand St.

Classes began two weeks later with one classroom for each of grades kindergarten through six.

In October, the school moved to 922 W. Republic Road, in space leased at Wesley United Methodist Church. Brown anticipates that class sizes will increase to about 15 students in the fall.

“We’ve had more than 50 applications for the fall,” Brown said.

There are 67 students now enrolled at the school.

The Summit is not the only school leasing space at Wesley United Methodist.

Jeff Slemp, business administrator for the church, said Parents Cooperative Preschool has leased space there for more than 20 years.

However, neither The Summit nor the preschool are affiliated with the church.

The Summit, he said, has signed a lease through June 2008 for space at the church.

“We’ve got them on the whole second floor wing,” Slemp added.

The move to Republic Road gives the school 12 classrooms, a gymnasium and a playground.

“We were already at capacity starting with Calvary,” Brown said, noting that of The Summit’s 67 current students, 12 enrolled after classes began.

Both Brown and Slemp declined to disclose the lease rate.

The new location, Brown said, allows the school to concentrate on growth without the responsibilities of owning a building just yet.

“It allows us to more financially stabilize as a new school. My hope is within four years to be looking at where do we go from here. We want our own campus, but by keeping ourselves in a rental position we can do so much more with our finances than sinking that into a building,” Brown said.

The Summit’s faculty comprises 10 teachers – one for each grade K–6, and one instructor each for music, physical education and Spanish.

In addition, there is a coordinator for before- and after-school activities and a business administrator.

For the Summit’s first school year, tuition was $4,200 per student.

Annual tuition for the coming year is set at $4,500 for kindergarten through fifth grade, and $4,900 for sixth and seventh grades.

A fund-raiser was held March 11 at Hickok’s, bringing in 140 people and $15,000 for the school. “It goes into the general fund in order to fund all the programs and things we’ve said we wanted to do,” Brown said.

One goal is to add one grade each year until all 12 grades are represented. Seventh grade will be added next year, and will be called Summit Explorers Program.

“Our program is looking at the whole child. We don’t want to just be a tech school, art school or academia school. We want to do all that successfully,” Brown said.

Business connections will play a vital role as the Explorers Program evolves.

“We feel like we need to captivate kids in a different way in academics during that age. We’ve realized that one of the important ways to do that is to help them at that time, when they’re seeking who they are, to really find and help them hone their talents and figure out what they’re good at and help them to see the long-term benefits of investing their time in developing those talents,” Brown said.

Once a month, Explorers students’ afternoons will be spent in a job-shadowing program.

The experience, Brown said, is designed to help students be more well-rounded by experiencing 24 careers by the time they’ve completed 8th grade.

“Once they find something that they can be really passionate about or something they can be really turned on to, all of a sudden their math homework becomes more meaningful, their science lesson becomes more relevant,” she said. “Those engaged students really participate more in their educational endeavors once you light that passion or fire underneath them. I think it’s a very crucial point of our students’ studies for next year.”

It’s too soon to line up businesses willing to participate in the job-shadowing program, Brown said, but two Summit parents would consider hosting students at their office.

“We’re certainly willing to do anything that we can help out the school and the kids in any way,” said Brian Malkmus, who practices law in Springfield with his wife, Deborah Malkmus. The Malkmuses’ sons attend third and fourth grade at The Summit.

“They went to Republic which, in and of itself, is a great school,” Brian Malkmus said. “We love the teachers there too, so it wasn’t like we were running from one to another. We just thought this was one that better suited us.”

The most attractive aspects of the school, he said, were individualized attention and smaller class sizes.[[In-content Ad]]