Twindly Bridge charter school garners approval

March 18, 2005

BOB MARTINSON/Frontiersman reporter

WASILLA - A new K-12 education program combining home schooling with structured school-based learning has been approved and plans to open by September 2005.

The Twindly Bridge charter school won approval from the state on Friday, March 11. The school will be a hybrid school that is partly home-based and partly a curriculum inside the school.tudent's

The school will open in September, somewhere in the Wasilla core area.

The location cannot be announced at this time, because of Mat-Su Borough ordinance - a request for proposal will later have to go up for bid to the public as to which building the school will be housed in.

Citing a high percentage of dropouts in Valley schools, Anna Roys, who, along with her family, helped design the school, said the new school will help those kids find something that might interest them more than in regular public school.

Roys serves on the Academic Policy Board, which is the board that governs charter schools. The school will expose students to various subjects such as music, math, sculpture, drama or anthropology and let students work within a structure they are interested in, once their particular individual curriculum is built.

Part of that curriculum will be done at home. A ol

Grants are in the works for implementation of the school and July 1 is the beginning of the new fiscal year.

The school will seek enrollment from the public, via a lottery with a deadline of May 1. More information can be found at http://www.freewebs.com/twindlybridgecharterschool/.

A workshop outlining lottery application procedures for the Twindly Bridge Charter School, designing individualized learning plans using research-based teaching strategies and giving information about ongoing mentoring programs will be available at the Mat-Su School District Home Based Education Curriculum Conference, scheduled for 9 a.m.-5 p.m., April 9 and 1-5 p.m. April 10 at Wasilla High School.

The new Twindly Bridge charter school and the Correspondence Study School will co-host the conference. Right now, both are recruiting people to give workshops for the home-based educating public.

More information can be found at http://www.freewebs.com/twindlybridgecharterschool/.