21st Century STEM Academy to Host Open House at New School near Emory

DECATUR – A sit-in flight simulator, robotic equipment, 3-D printers and robotic pancake-makers will be among the leading edge educational technologies on display from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 16 at 21st Century STEM Academy (21C) as the new school hosts its first drop-in Open House for prospective students and their parents.

Located adjacent to the Emory University campus, the high-tech version of a one-room school house will give the community a chance to learn about 21C’s personalized education model. Featuring accomplished teachers working with student-teacher ratios of 12-1, the new school will enable every student to thrive through individualized and personalized learning with a research-based curriculum.

“Our small classes and project-enhanced, mastery-based learning with one-to-one tutoring will ensure each child excels,” said Gareth N. Genner, co-founder of 21C and former president of a blue ribbon, k-12 college prep school. “Not every child learns at the same pace or in the same way, and this personalized STEM and liberal arts approach is what many parents are seeking for their children to prepare them for the future.”

Located at 1549 Clairmont Road in Decatur, the school is expected to draw as many as 100 students in grades K-10 from the Emory, North Druid Hills, Decatur, Midtown, Virginia Highlands community in its first academic year which kicks off in August. The school will expand to K-12 in 2018 with the planned addition of another campus facility.

21C’s facility contains 4,000 sq. ft. of unique space designed to offer a host of learning experiences, ranging from Mandarin Chinese language immersion, to computer coding, robotics and project based learning. The flight simulator, for example, will be used across a host of academic subjects. Yoga will be available for pupils in a unique tranquil room.

The new school will offer students up to 200 school days, running from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. After-school activities and pre and after-school care will be available at no additional cost so parents can have their child at the school from 7:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. All-inclusive tuition is $700 a month or $8,400 annually.

“There are many parents in this community searching for affordable, high-quality instruction that will challenge their children across the curriculum,” said Pam Liu, lead teacher at 21C. “We look forward to showing them just how much fun this school will be for their children – and how they will learn to their fullest potential.”

Although the full-time academic program will not launch until August, school-day and after school STEM programs will begin Jan. 18, including opportunities for homeschool students. Beginning in August, homeschool students will be able to join the full-time students to supplement their instruction by attending 21C classes one or two days a week.

21C uses an academic model based on the research of Professor Benjamin Bloom that found that a combination of personal tutoring, combined with mastery learning, enabled students to outperform other students by two standard deviations. The average mastery-tutored student out-performed more than 98 percent of the students in a traditional class. About 90 percent of the mastery-tutored students attained a level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20 percent in a traditional class setting.

Bloom called these results the “two- sigma problem” because, while the master-tutoring method is highly effective, society could not afford a personal tutor for every child. After over 15 years of working on a solution to “the problem,” 21C’s founders have finally achieved a cost-effective solution through the integration of artificial intelligence-enabled technology, with small classes, and passionate educators.

The new school, one in a series to open in metro Atlanta, is one of the first in the nation outside of California to adopt and implement the acclaimed program developed by the University of California at Davis that integrates math, computer science, robotics, videography and other art & STEM subjects.

Monday’s Open House is the first of several that will be scheduled this winter.

To submit an application or learn more about the school, go to www.21stcenturystem.academy.