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The Academy of Greater Cincinnati, as it was formally called, or the Academy for Gifted Children, as it was unofficially called, is now defunct. It will be unable to open next year. I wasn't attending in its last year anyway, so it doesn't affect me much, but the death of such a rare school shouldn't go unannounced. The Academy had been in decline before I left it. Some of its best students and teachers were leaving, which is certainly significant for such a small school. From my view, the curriculum declined from when I was around in fifth and sixth grade and the seventh grade year, when it lost its academic edge in all subjects but math and history.
Maybe its closer to the truth that the subjects were less illusioning as I grew older. After having a terrible time at public schools, I was elated to attend the school in the fifth grade, and maybe that clouded my judement. Nevertheless it seems that it would be a disgrace to what it was to say that it had been, during the whole time I was there, what it was when I was in seventh grade. During my fifth and sixth grade years, especially in the early fifth grade, I was surrounded by more intellectual peers at, slightly below, or (the majority of such intellectual peers) above my age. There had always been weaknesses in the teaching, but these were less so during this time. Math and History/English (the two classes were merged, under one teacher) were always challenging and enjoyable (or at least tolerable, at times) thoughout my time there, and that was because of the teachers in those subjects. A very hands-on, enthusiastic, and talented art teacher also made my weakest point of visual art enjoyable during fifth grade. The art teacher left due to health issues with his children at the end of that year, but the Academy continued to be an intellectually rich school thanks to its math and history teachers, the intelligent kids, and its weekly activities such as swimming, rock climbing, and ice skating. The brightest of the Academy kids slowly began to leave for personal reasons, diminishing the quality of the school (for me, at least). The leaving kids were replaced with younger kids and less gifted kids and the Academy continued to grow like a distended stomach. Many of the new "gifted children" were hardly gifted, and rather than attending the private school because of inability to cope with the anti-academic environment of public schools, many of these newcomers attended because they expected to have their "special needs" attended to. The growing size of the Academy meant that starting in the fifth grade year classes were based more on age than on intellectual ability in the fifth grade (though there were plenty of bright kids in my class -- at first) and that by the seventh grade year the Academy was no longer able to provide transportation for all of its students to the weekly sports activities. Schedule gaps were increasingly filled with "Study Halls", especially for Jack and me, who had at the beginning of seventh grade two hours of "study hall" every day. Other than the two aforementioned classes the actual classes were nothing but fluff like yoga, dance, and drama. Our math class meant that Jack and I couldn't go to science at the same time as our peers. The first attempt at fixing this problem was to have the science teacher we had always had give us a physics lesson during one of the study halls we had. She prefered to socialize rather than to teach us. We protested, and so we had those study halls, and half a math period so that we could spend the other half hour with younger kids, though with a more competent science teacher. Later in the year this problem was "solved" by moving us back with the lazy science teacher.
My problems, of course, couldn't be the end of the Academy. Its mismanagement was. To quote Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead :
" 'All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men -- and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting...' " -- Kent Lansing, page 311 (on the Signet Edition, at least -- I'm not sure about other editions)
I of course never was on the board at the Academy and never had any first hand experience, but I heard about the disagreeements of the board. The inability for the Academy to manage itself was one of its greatest weaknesses. It never managed to make itself a certified private high school, and so all diplomas given from the Academy -- there was only one -- were to be the equivalent of home school diplomas. The Academy was much more of a smaller-kid friendly school than a high school. As frustrations mounted, people continued to leave, including a large exodus of many people I knew, including myself, Jack, and the History/English teacher, after my seventh grade year. The board proved unable to solve financial problems or make any radical changes which could bring the school back to its former height. Many people were unsure about whether or not to enroll their kids, or if they could. Finally the fate of the Academy depended on the smaller children that it had been serving best, and when a large majority of these students' parents decided not to enroll the Academy was done for. Mismanagement proved its downfall.
It's a shame that it's over. But in my opinion it was largely over before I left. I wasn't there in the last year, but following what was said about the following year at the end of seventh grade I can suspect that it was hardly a gifted school in its last year, compared to what it was. I hope that something grows to take its place. Despite some bitterness I may have towards its last stages I still believe that it was a great school and provided education for gifted children that public schools honestly cannot provide (In my libertarian opinion there shouldn't even be public schools; like most government services they are not efficient, they benefit the public primarily by taking the rightful property of the rich and upper middle class, and by taking away this property they limit the choices that people have with how to spend their own money on their education). After what I had endured particularly in my fourth grade year and the following summer, the Academy was a lifesaver.