The Prairie School Partnership Programs
The Racine Area School-Community Alliance (RASCA) was developed as a collaborative partnership between private and public schools in the greater Racine/Kenosha area that focuses on key topics that impact us all. Through RASCA, The Prairie School’s goal is to make strides toward broader understanding and increased awareness of physical health, mental health, and learning issues that affect young people and families by bringing experts, researched-based current information, as well as community resources to all of our parents and students.
C.L.A.S.S. (Character, Leadership, Accountability, Service, Sustainability) @The Prairie School is a multiage leadership program that partners Upper, Middle, and Primary School students together into a nontraditional classroom experience. The program is structured around workshops spread over the course of the school year. The multi-age groups commit themselves to full participation, inclusivity, searching, role-modeling, contribution, and co-designing of the experience throughout the year, constructing and deepening their knowledge of the topics they have selected through a transdisciplinary approach, and responding to their learning with community and personal action.
Since its inception in 2010, C.L.A.S.S. has, following student interest and direction, explored issues surrounding cultural sustainability, social responsibility, and universal human rights. They have come to commit themselves, ultimately, to addressing poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, here in Racine while engaging others from around the world in our conversation and action.
C.L.A.S.S.’s Mission is to
recognize an injustice in their world,
learn about affected communities,
create relationships with them,
and serve them with action and awareness-building.
Not only does C.L.A.S.S. provide leadership for others, but it also promotes personal growth in its members and sustains its work by teaching others how to lead themselves.
The Center for Developing Excellence
The Center for Developing Excellence (CDE) STEM Academy gives students, in grades 5-8, the opportunity to participate in real-world science, technology, engineering, and math lab-based adventures. During the 5-day hands-on course, students design, build, and discover solutions to challenging real world problems. The Academy focuses on improving students’ observation and critical thinking skills, team participation, and problem solving strategies. These skills are are infused into topics such as green chemistry, water sciences, genetics, forensics, aeronautical engineering, computer programming and robotics.
The goal of the Center for Developing Excellence is to keep middle and early high school students excited about potential STEM careers in their future. Their experiences in The Prairie School’s broad STEM curriculum are created to motivate students to pursue advanced science, technology, and math classes throughout their high school years. Students are recruited from public, private, charter and parochial middle schools in the Racine area to provide a program that offers diversity across a wide demographic. Tuition assistance is available to provide the opportunity for any student to attend.
Emily's Day of Service
Named for a former student who was a very active volunteer and tragically lost her life just before entering high school, Emily’s Day occurs every year in April. Our entire Upper School student body and faculty spends the day helping sustain the social and environmental well-being of our community of Racine, Wisconsin. Students sign up to go to one of 15-18 different sites throughout the city where they chip in by doing myriad activities, including pulling invasive species at a local park; playing games with the elderly; disinfecting toys at a homeless shelter; painting rooms at a women’s shelter; sorting food at a food pantry; doing yard work for the elderly; picking up litter at a county park or preparing the soil for spring planting at an urban garden plot.
After spending the morning off-campus, the students return to school for lunch and listen to a speaker or partake in additional volunteer activities with the Middle and Primary School students. The day ends with student created presentations sharing what they have done and a celebration of the day’s activities. Besides the community benefiting from 750+ hours of free labor, the students learn of the improvement projects on-going in our community and gain a perspective on hardships that some endure on a daily basis.