Great Hearts gears up to expand operations in Anthem, open 23rd Valley campus in Buckeye
Two new Great Hearts Academies charter school campuses will open for students this fall.
The charter school network, which has 22 locations in metro Phoenix, is currently finishing up work in its 23rd location and its first campus in Buckeye, named Great Hearts Roosevelt Preparatory Academy.
The organization is also in the final stages of construction work on a 10-acre property at the corner of Gavilan Peak Parkway and Arroyo Norte Drive, where an expanded Anthem campus will serve new pupils and students enrolled at the current Great Hearts Anthem Prep Academy two miles away.
Both locations have spots open for enrollment.
Roosevelt Preparatory Academy, which sits on Jackrabbit Trail between Yuma Road and Van Buren Street in Buckeye, will offer classes for pre-K and K-8 students when it opens this fall. Operations will expand to every grade level as the incoming eighth-grade class moves up.
Roosevelt will be the biggest campus in the Great Hearts network, sitting on a 25-acres land that will allow the school to invest in a high school building once the student body grows. The plans call for a classical look that includes Roman columns throughout.
The school will have an indoor gymnasium and an outdoor sports field. There will also be accommodations for students with disabilities, who will have a dedicated space to work with specialized professionals such as physiotherapists and speech therapists.
Roosevelt will serve about 800 K-8 students when it opens but will be able to accommodate 1,100 students when operating at full capacity.
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Classical education approach
The charter network prides itself in offering “classical education,” which the Institute for Classical Education, an organization connected to the Great Hearts Foundation, says “takes a unifying approach to intellectual and moral formation by developing both the mind and the heart.”
The approach, according to the institute, also has been adopted by religious schools and homeschooling families.
Great Hearts curriculum covers languages, including Latin and Greek, sciences, history, math, literature and fine arts. High school seniors are required to read “the greatest works of philosophy and literature in Western civilization,” such as the works of Plato, Aristotle and Dostoevsky, in order to write a 15- to 20-page thesis they will need to defend in order to graduate, Roosevelt K-5 Headmaster Stephen Philabaum said.
Philabaum said the organization was founded to make its approach available to everyone since there was a "time period where it was reserved for a private elite who could afford it."
"We’ve taken this beautiful vision of classical education and these tried and true methods of teaching the best quality of literature and music and surrounding our students in beautiful things,” he said.
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Great Heats' expansion
Great Hearts, one of the largest charter networks in the state, started opening charter schools in metro Phoenix about 15 years ago. In 2014, the organization opened its first location in Texas, where it now has 11 campuses spread throughout the Dallas and San Antonio metro areas.
The network offers an online learning option for families in these two states and has three locations of “microschools," which gather small groups of students to learn virtually in the same space, in Phoenix, Glendale and the Dallas metro area.
Although there are no current plans for additional expansions in the Valley, Great Hearts will open new schools in Florida, Louisiana and Texas this year.
Great Hearts currently boasts the claim of “largest provider of liberal arts classical education campuses in the country,”
Roosevelt Prep Headmaster Tony Cruz said Great Hearts opened its first location in the East Valley and its first expansions were focused on similar communities but eventually the organization invested in schools throughout the Valley.
He said the move came from the organization’s founders, who realized they were still opening campuses in “suburban areas that are homogeneous, for middle-upper class people who understand the value of classical liberal education,” so the premise behind the expansions was to achieve their goal of reaching students of every background.
Reach the reporter at rclo@arizonarepublic.com or at 480-267-4703. Follow her on Twitter @renataclo.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Great Hearts charter plans expansion in Buckeye, Anthem
