Fulton Science Academy Private School is the private school that never intended to be private. Our one and only goal at our inception fifteen years ago was to offer a premier rigorous STEM education to as many students as we could physically serve without regard to economic situation, academic standing, or learning challenges and guide them towards reaching their greatest potential.
We began as a county authorized public charter school fifteen years ago and transitioned into a private school in our eleventh year. Over the period of fifteen years, we have developed a highly successful rigorous academic program, expanded from a middle school to serving all grades; pre-k through high school, transitioned from serving all student populations to specializing in advanced and gifted education, have grown from originally educating students from just one county in Georgia to accepting international students, from originally operating only on state tax funding to a tuition based model, and in 2015 moved from our original site in a small converted warehouse to an eighteen acre campus with a 67,000 square foot state of the art educational facility. Throughout our history, we have won local, regional, state, national, and international awards; ultimately being recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence in our last year as a charter school. The two things that have never changed in our mission and vision are to provide our students with a premier rigorous education and assist our students in reaching their fullest potential. It has been quite a journey, but one that has taught us and been embodied within our very culture perseverance, strength, endurance, optimism, humility, and flexibility, which we have found are all necessary to meet the challenges of an ever-changing operating environment in order to continually serve our students and school community to the best of our ability.
Today, we serve advanced and gifted students primarily residing in the North Georgia area utilizing a STEAM educational framework. Last year, Fulton Science Academy represented Georgia in seven national and international competitions, including FLL Robotics, Math Counts, Science Olympiad, Destination Imagination, Model United Nations, History Bowl, and the World Chess Competition. Our STEM program is highly developed, while the Arts are the newest segment to our program offerings and one that we are currently expanding and cultivating. We continue to develop our STEAM focused initiatives and weave character education throughout our program. Fulton Science Academy strives to develop highly successful, well-rounded, and goal oriented individuals that embody integrity, empathy, and kindness, as well as, possess the ability to communicate well and embrace change in a positive manner. A lofty goal indeed, but one we will reach through the collaborative partnership we have formed with our parents and community as a whole. We are a community with one mission, one vision, and on one path that culminates in graduating academically successful students, grounded and well- balanced individuals, positive role models, and conscientious contributors to society.
FSA’s academic program and environment is constantly being monitored, re-evaluated, and evolving to meet the needs of our students and exceed the expectations of our parents and community. We are unique in our approach to education as we are open to change and constantly seek out new research, methods, procedures, curriculums, and tools to better serve our students and improve their educational experience, as well as, results. When training new staff, we often ask them to envision a box, which represents the educational training and environments that they have come from, and then imagine opening the top flaps and slitting the sides with a box cutter, so as to create an infinite area of possibilities and solutions to address opportunities and improve student outcomes.
To that end, our administration and staff are now in the process of developing a gifted educational model, program, and set of educational grade level standards that can be disseminated to other schools. As part of that process, we will also create a set of operational, financial, and human resource policy and procedural manuals and templates that can be modified to meet an individual school’s needs, as well. Not only will this process help us continually improve our own program, it will support our dynamic and collaborative culture, and allow us to help serve students on a larger scale than we directly could ourselves.
Ultimately, after we have reached the full potential of our current campus, we would like to open private schools in other areas. Advanced and gifted student populations are underserved throughout our state and the nation and we would like to have a role in seeing that changed. Regardless of economic standing or age, a student should be met where they are academically when they enter school and then given the opportunity for continuous academic forward progression. It is our sincere belief that educational standards should be viewed as minimum expectations, not goals and our role as educators is not to define what any child is allowed to learn by grade level and age, but rather to help them learn the most that they can in any school year despite their age.
Who we have become and where we are is definitely not what we envisioned fifteen years ago, but we would argue that the challenges, uncertainties, and evolutionary changes have allowed us to become and/or work toward becoming better as educators and who we were ultimately meant to be. Fulton Science Academy was very successful as a public charter school serving all student populations and we are highly successful as a private school focused on the targeted needs of advanced and gifted students. In the end, we want Fulton Science Academy to be known as a quality educational institution that serves its students well and prepares them to be successful leaders and role models upon graduation.