Urban Collaborative Accelerated Program (UCAP)

Description

UCAP was founded in 1989 as an independent public middle school for at-risk students, to address the unremitting dropout rate among Rhode Island students.

• We enroll students who have been retained-in-grade and exhibit other characteristics that suggest they are in danger of dropping out.
• Our students and their families care about their futures, and we embrace the diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints that they bring to our learning community.
• Our students possess many assets, and will assume responsibility for their own learning and achieve at high levels.
• Our students will advance-in-grade at an accelerated rate when presented with challenging and flexible learning plans, a supportive and structured community, and clear expectations of high performance from all members.
• Valuable learning goes on beyond the traditional boundaries of the school day, school year, or school building, so we partner with students’ families, community-based organizations, businesses, foundations, and other groups that have a stake in the success of all children.
• An effective learning community, based upon best practices, helps students become successful life-long learners, so our educators will do whatever it takes to ensure the success of each child, and to be held accountable for the results.
• All members of the UCAP learning community are committed to their own on-going development in order to be able to help students achieve at the highest levels.
• We are committed to school-based management with shared decision-making, exploration of innovative ideas, use of best practices, and experimentation.

• We believe that many more students could benefit from our acceleration model than can be accommodated at UCAP, and so we must advocate for and seek opportunities to develop new schools based on our model.