Mission
Statement
Sarasota School of
Arts and Sciences provides a small, intimate environment of academic
excellence and enrichment, utilizing community partnerships as well as
traditional and innovative teaching methods.
Mission
Accomplished
Sarasota School of Arts and Sciences is certainly more than an
educational institution that teaches children to regurgitate simple
facts and figures. SSA+S is a middle school that presents a “way of
life,” regarding educational achievement, by instilling in its
students the ability to develop learning skills by instructing via
many neural pathways. This teaching technique, coupled with our
“Holistic Approach of the Total Child,” philosophy, focused on the
Development Domain Paradigm, promotes a high level of mastery of
relevant concepts and Sunshine State Standards of each content area.
Moreover, by teaching via this method, the student develops learning
procedures and adopts learning acquisition tools that in turn
perpetuate even more significant learning gains in the cognitive,
affective, and psychomotor domains, not only for middle school, but
subsequently for high school and post secondary institutions. The
result of implementing a dynamic educational philosophy 11 years ago,
utilizing cutting edge teaching methods with the latest technological
tools in the classroom, and following an interdisciplinary
curriculum
within a multicultural environment has been the consistent attainment
over the last several years of an “A” grade from the Florida
Department of Education and the achievement of earning Adequate Yearly
Progress (AYP) related to student learning gains as outlined in the No
Child Left Behind Federal Legislation.
As an example of how rigorous it is to
achieve AYP, there were only 23 percent of Florida schools that
achieved this honor for the 2009-2010 school year.
As Christa McAuliffe
(the teacher/astronaut) stated, “I touch the future, I teach.” Not
only do I believe that Sarasota School of Arts and Sciences touches
the future, I truly believe that we can, do, and will continue to
change the future of children in a positive way. We stand on the
belief that all children can learn and, coupled with this belief, we
embrace the ideology of promoting tolerance and acceptance of all.
When all stakeholders of an organization take ownership of this
approach/ideology, they effectively alter the esprit de corps of their
organization in becoming a very positive environment in which to work
and learn. Almost the very second that the majority of our faculty and
children at SSA+S took ownership of this ideology of tolerance and
acceptance of all people, the bullying, fighting, arguing, etc. all
but ceased at our educational institution. Something certainly can be
said of the quote, “A child shall lead them.” It has been witnessed on
several occasions where the pejorative parental perceptions of those
unlike themselves, coupled with the stereotypes that they embraced,
the biases they believed to be true, and the overall ethnocentric
attitudes that they held, were actually changed as these parents were
able to see their children embrace a better and more positive way in
which to live. If schools like ours, that are color and
preference-blind, coupled with embracing the ideology of acceptance of
all people and all cultures, were proliferated around the globe, there
would be fewer horrific attacks such as “9-11”, fewer bombings
throughout the world, and fewer deplorable acts of racism, ageism,
sexism, ethnic cleansing, and religious intolerance. SSA+S certainly
produces a product, an educational citizen, but even more than that,
our school affects change in citizens and their family’s in such a way
that the world in which we live can truly become a better place for
all of its inhabitants.
Click here for the SSAS Charter
Click here for the SSAS By Laws
