The State Charter Schools Commission conducts yearly comprehensive performance reviews of charter schools with a focus on academics, operations and finances. The school is currently operating on a probationary two-year charter set to end in 2024. The two school years that followed were interrupted by the pandemic.Ĭirrus’s charter was set to expire in 2022, but the school’s governing board successfully petitioned the State Charter Schools Commission for renewal. Just before the 2020 COVID pandemic, Cirrus’s middle school students academically out-performed Bibb County Schools’ middle school students for the 2018-2019 school year, but Cirrus still fell short of meeting academic standards that year. The recent achievement, for the 2021-2022 school year, marks the first-ever time Cirrus met the academic standards it agreed to in its charter contracts with the State Charter Schools Commission. It is a state-chartered STEAM school, focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math.Ĭirrus is also a Title I school, a designation that means it receives extra federal money because it high percentage of enrolled students live in poverty. So that’s what we’ve been doing.”Ĭirrus Academy is housed in the former Eugenia Hamilton School on Pio Nono Avenue near Mercer University Drive. “It is my belief, as a longtime educator, that if we give our scholars the tools and teach them, they’re gonna show that academic growth. “We took an aggressive approach because we want to ensure that all of our scholars grow academically,” Fowler said. Fowler said the school also focused on data-driven goal setting for individual students, small group learning and guided reading. The State Charter Schools Commission notified the school of the achievement via email last week.įowler said she attributes the academic growth to a concentrated effort by the school to better train and prepare teachers.

“This is great news,” Superintendent and CEO Gail Fowler said in a video announcement posted to the school’s Facebook page on Monday.

Cirrus academy