Las Cruces Academy

Introduction

Hello, friends! For those of you who are wondering what happened to the December newsletter, we decided to roll it into the January newlsetter (this one). And while the time-honored tradition of things taking longer and being more difficult than we would like continues to be in force, having two newsletters in one makes this one extra-special. Bon appétit!

Table of Contents:

• Admissions
• Teachers
• Donations in 2008
• Renovations
• Outreach
• Volunteering Opportunities
• The Public Schools

Admissions

The admissions process is not only started, but well under way! We've started receiving applications, and we plan to start sending out our first letters of acceptance within the next two weeks, with new batches going out every two weeks until we hit our cap of 30 students. We're very pleased with what we've seen so far, which we expect will translate into a high acceptance rate this year. For those of you who haven't yet downloaded the forms, here are links to the application, recommendation letter form, and process overview.

Teachers

We thought we were done with initial interviews in December, but new applicants have continued to pop up almost daily. Not wanting to miss out on a spectacular teacher, we've continued to interview them even as we've started to schedule secondary (final) interviews. Secondary interviews will be conducted by a hiring committee, but (and this is the part you'll like) are open to parents of prospective students, meaning you can come meet them and give your input. Secondary interviews will be listed on our calendar as they are scheduled, and will be starting this week.

Donations in 2008

After tallying all donations from 2008, we found we had received:

$3,372.13 in cash
2,055 books (we estimated a total value of $6,799)
$5,345 in educational materials
$3,726 in goods that were used to raise money
$4,500 in professional services
Adding them all together gives us $23,742.13 in donations. It's not bad for a school that hasn't opened yet, but to provide scholarships, supplies, and a campus which will eventually fit over 300 students, we'll need to raise significantly more from now on.

Renovations

We aren't anywhere near finishing renovations like we'd hoped, but we're plodding along through what has proved to be a much more involved process than we would have liked. In any case, we have finally signed a contract with an architect after a distressingly long period in which it was unclear what exactly the city would demand in the renovations. We will still have to go through the process of getting the plans approved by the city and actually having the work performed, but we are operating under the "measure twice, cut once" philosophy when it comes to expensive renovations; in other words, we're trying to make sure there will be no unpleasant surprises after we've signed by the X.

Outreach

An important part of our vision for LCA is the outreach program (officially LCA Outreach), and we'd like to make the first activity of the program a set of 6 one-hour-long science lectures open to the public. The lectures will be targeted at adults and older children who want to learn a little bit about how the world (and technology) operate and who like the idea of discovering it through demonstrations where they're free to ask questions and make suggestions. We haven't located a venue for the lectures, so if you have a (free) location in mind, please let us know so we can contact the appropriate people. We plan on making the lectures free with no ticket required, although donations will be accepted as tax-deductible donations to provide scholarships for students at LCA.

Volunteering Opportunities

If you have any experience accounting and would be willing to spend an hour or two a week keeping financial records in order, we'd love to hear from you. In fact, we'd love to hear from you even if you're not interested in financial records. For example, the vast majority of our thousands of library books haven't been catalogued and barcoded, but we've been so busy taking care of hiring, admissions, and renovations that they've just been languishing away in a wall of boxes waiting for attention. You don't like receipts or cataloguing books? Not a problem. We need publicists, event organizers, amateur lobbyists, and much, much more, so please let us know when you have a spare hour and we'll put you to work.

The Public Schools

If you live in districts 1, 2, or 3, we hope you voted in today's school board election. Despite the fact that we believe the public schools are overloaded and very seriously underperforming, they still deserve your attention and ours, if only because they are in charge of the education of the vast majority of our community's children. But that is far from the only reason; the nature of the public school system is dictated by the people in it, the way people who aren't in it treat those people, and by politicians. If, to show our disapproval of the job the public schools are doing, we ignore it, we are as much to blame for its poor performance as anybody else. By voting, by calling politicians to tell them how important education is to you, by fighting for better teacher certification programs, you can help raise the standard of education.

We started a private school because we believe it is the most effective thing we can do for education. We want to provide an excellent education for the children who can make the best of it, but we also hope to serve as an example of what can be done. That said, a single private school won't solve our educational problem. We need to support the teachers who labor under a load of 150 to 200 students, trying their best to educate every single one of them despite the bureacracy. We need to fight for those principals who make teachers' lives easier. We need to tell our legislators that we think the system is broken, and that it should be fixed, not ignored. So if you're reading this newsletter because education matters to you, don't just ignore the public schools because you don't like the job they're doing. Pay attention to them because you don't like the job they're doing and you want to see them improve.

Best Wishes,
Dr. Lou Ellen Kay
Director, Las Cruces Academy