Accotink Alternative Learning Center - Springfield, VA

Director's Message

Welcome to the Accotink Alternative School community!

Our program for the 2009-2010 academic year is a product of proven successes and collaborative inspiration. We’ve raised the bar even higher with our staff’s commitment to the success of each student. As a team, our creativity, curiosity, and compassion allow us the unique opportunity to encourage our students to think, to imagine, to try, and to learn.

The goal of our school is to provide each student with a challenging and rigorous curriculum, appropriate to each child's academic level and learning style. We believe every child can achieve academic success. To this end, every student engages in quality instructional experiences, which recognize, support, and maintain high expectations for all students. Each student is an individual of great worth and is entitled to develop to his/her fullest potential.
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Our Mission

The mission of Accotink Alternatives to provide each student an individualized education in a safe, supportive environment that promotes self-discipline, motivation & excellence in learning. The Accotink Alternative team joins the parents and community to assist students in developing the necessary scholastic and professional skills for the highest level of success possible.

It is our goal to help each of our students reach both their educational and emotional potential; to recognize that each child has her/his own style of learning; and to strive to discover how we may use the skills and talents possessed by each student. we are dedicated to the task of helping our students become more self-directed and better able to face the outside world with a confidence that allows them to become productive members of society.

History

Accotink Academy was established in Springfield Virginia in 1964, by Elaine McConnell, the architect of its program. The success of the school was immediate and enrollment grew from 40 students the first year to 400 within a three-year period. Mrs. McConnell's advanced curriculum was evident when students from the Academy entered the highly rated Fairfax County School System well ahead of their classmates in areas of reading and math.

In 1967, Mrs. McConnell opened the first school for learning disabled students in the Washington/Virginia Metropolitan Area. With no courses being offered in the colleges at that time for teachers of the learning disabled, she developed her own curriculum using specialists from the medical and psychoeducational fields as advisors.

To continue her love of education in the area she grew up in, Mrs. McConnell branched out her successful Virginia programs and opened Accotink Academy by the Sea in Ponte Vedra Beach Florida in 1997.

Research conducted at Accotink Academy over the years has strengthened Mrs. McConnell's theories that the preschool years are the most vital in the learning process. If training is introduced early in the child's life, enhancement of skills can be accomplished.

Accotink Academy today, is a private therapeutic day school for students with a variety of learning and emotional disabilities. We operate under the Proprietary School Division of the Virginia Department of Education.