Heard About This charter School on Hugh Hewitt Yesterday

The following charter school is the kind talked about in WAITING FOR SUPERMAN

(Wiki) As a charter school Veritas Prep offers a Great Books education centering around fundamental texts in the Western pantheon. Veritas Prep’s philosophy includes small class size (no classroom has more than 22 students) and education using the Socratic method.

As a public school in the state of Arizona, Veritas Preparatory Academy has no entrance requirements. Interested families must apply for the school’s annual admissions lottery, which takes place in the spring of each school year. However, if a family has one child enrolled, any other children automatically receive a spot. Software designed by alumnus Joseph Irvine is used to perform these lotteries randomly. Because the academy is a charter school, it has the right to cap its enrollment. An addition in the 2010-2011 school year is one class of sixth grade.

Veritas Preparatory Academy offers few choices in its academic curriculum. 9-12th grade students may choose to study Latin/Greek, French, or Spanish. The rest of the curriculum is fixed. Students at Veritas Prep exceed all requirements for students graduating from the state of Arizona.

Veritas Preparatory Academy has recently added a 6th grade to their school.

  • 7th grade:
    • English Literature and Composition (readings include Shane, A Wind in the Willows, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Tales of the Greek Heroes, The Miracle Worker, stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and A Christmas Carol)
    • Pre-Algebra
    • Life Science (plants & fungi, single-cell & multi-cell animals)
    • Ancient History (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome)
    • Music (including an introduction to theory, note-reading, and soprano recorder performance)
    • Latin I
    • Studio Art I (basic composition and drawing techniques)
  • 8th grade:
    • English Literature and Composition (Readings include Beowulf, The Chosen, The Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird, selections from Canterbury Tales, Legends of King Arthur, and selections from American poetry)
    • Algebra I
    • Earth Science (geology, geography, meteorology, astronomy)
    • Medieval History (England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Islamic Civilization, the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, the Christian Church; The Song of Roland is read)
  • Music (including more music theory and recorder ensemble performance involving soprano, alto, and tenor instruments)
    • Latin II
    • Studio Art II (including color theory and painting)
  • 9th grade:
    • Humane Letters: The American Tradition (Readings include the US Constitution and The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, Huckleberry Finn, My Antonia, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Great Gatsby)
    • Geometry
    • Biology
    • Music (including composition and choral performance)
    • Poetry Composition
    • Modern Language I or Latin III
  • 10th grade:
    • Humane Letters: The Rise of Modern Europe (Readings include Locke’s Second Treatise, Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Shakespeare’s Henry V, Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch)
    • Algebra II
    • Physics I : Mechanics
    • Music
    • Poetry Composition
    • Modern Language II or Latin IV
  • 11th grade:
    • Humane Letters: Ancient Greece (Readings include the Iliad and Odyssey, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato’s Republic and selected dialogues, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and selections from the Hebrew Bible)
    • Pre-Calculus/Calculus A
    • Physics II: Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics, Wave Motion
    • Drama
    • Art
    • Modern Language II or Ancient Greek I
  • 12th grade:
    • Humane Letters: Western Thought from the Middle Ages to Modernity (Readings include the Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, selections from the New Testament, Macbeth and King Lear, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Machiavelli, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov)
    • Calculus B,C
    • Chemistry
    • Drama
    • Art
    • Modern Language IV or Ancient Greek II
    • Senior Thesis