RISE SCHOOL MISSION
Our mission is to provide the highest quality early childhood education for all children - gifted, traditional and developmentally delayed - in an inclusive setting, where individualized learning techniques enable every child to achieve their maximum potential.
RISE GOALS
The Rise program is a nationally recognized early childhood education model with three major goals:
1) To provide children with a developmentally appropriate curriculum enhanced by individualized services and supports.
(2) To provide family-centered services designed to meet the needs of all children and families.
(3) To prepare children for their next educational environment.
Vision and Philosophy
At Rise, we have a 50:50 ratio per classroom of students with disabilities and students without disabilities. The inclusion of children of differing abilities at Rise is known as an “integrated environment,” and it is absolutely core to the school’s mission. The short and long-term benefits of an integrated environment are equally great for children with and without disabilities.
Rise is the only private preschool in the Corpus area committed to fully integrated classroom experience for all its students. Rise School graduates leave the school reading and writing at a pre-kindergarten level, with an introduction to basic math and science, with strong social and classroom skills. All of them are ready to be a full member of a mainstream public-school classroom. Children with disabilities and those without do not see a distinction between themselves - they are simply friends who play and learn together.
Developmentally disabled children at Rise learn first-hand that their peers will have a range of abilities different from their own. These experiences prepare them to succeed in public school mainstream classrooms at the elementary and equip them to participate fully in their places of employment or volunteering working beside adults without disabilities later in life. Traditional learners at Rise acquire the gift of compassion to understand and empathize with people of differing abilities which they will carry with them throughout life.
For children with disabilities, the integrated classroom allows them to observe and “model” after peers, working to develop the same age-appropriate skills and behaviors their typically developing peers’ exhibit. “Modeling” is a fundamental learning strategy used by all humans to acquire new abilities. Rise believes that if children with disabilities do not have the opportunity to be with typically developing peers in the classroom, we set expectations too low for their development and deny them the opportunity to learn at a pace with their peers.