ST 1.1

River Ridge Academy offers a unique STEM experience to all students in our school grades PK-8 regardless of grade level, interest level, gender, ethnicity or specialized program.  Every student in our school in grades K-5 participate in Project Lead the Way (PLTW) Launch within their classrooms daily. In addition, PK-4 students are enrolled in a LEGO Robotics Lab weekly where they are exposed to the Engineering Design Process and a curriculum that supports STEM based applications related to real world problems.  In grade 5 every student is scheduled for computer technology as an encore course and in grades 6-8 every student is scheduled for a minimum of one semester each year of the PLTW curricula (Intro to Career Clusters, Design and Modeling, Automation and Robotics) during their encore periods.  In addition, all middle school students have the options of enrolling in other STEM based course offerings of Media Arts and Google Basics (.5 high school credit) at the middle school level.  

Below is a chart of the number of students enrolled in our STEM curriculum courses.

Population Type (K-8)	Enrollment in STEM courses	Percentage
Total	1037	100%
Male	526
Female	511
Asian	26
Black or African American	108
Hispanic/Latino	246
Two or more races	41
White	613
Other	3
Students with Disabilities	68

 

 

River Ridge Academy is a school of choice for Project Lead the Way (PLTW) and Montessori. PLTW places an emphasis on curriculum that encourages hands-on engagement, problem solving and the use of technology for research, collaboration and project presentation. The Montessori method is based on a child’s natural desire to learn. Students actively learn within a prepared environment of attractive, carefully sequenced materials and engage in many independent tasks that they complete at their own pace. The Montessori program is organized into multi-aged classrooms that include the lower elementary for 1st through 3rd graders and the upper elementary that include 4th and 5th graders.