Grades: K-12
Director: Claudia Weintraub
Website: www.riveroakscharter.com
River Oaks Academy is a personalized learning public charter school. It is our mission to help children find, nurture and sustain the passion that leads to brilliance. River Oaks Academy is WASC and NCAA accredited.
As personalized learning program, we work with our students on a one-on-one basis to create a learning plan that works for them, incorporating their strengths and supporting them along the way.
The parents of our students are an integral part of our students’ path to become life-long learners, academically competent, ready for college and career and competent citizens in the 21st Century.
We provide our students with exploration-based, creative and innovative methods to develop their talents, meet the standards and work at their full potential. We use a variety of tools, including traditional and online curriculum, a myriad of supports, including our 24/7 phone application to help with math and one-on-one tutoring where needed. We have on-site focus rooms and subject labs to further encourage our students to seek support when needed.
We offer our students a wide choice of courses through many different forms of curriculum. Our high school students can choose from classes at the Career Education Center, the junior colleges and our own course catalog. Many of our courses are a-g approved, and we also have vendors who supply us with a myriad of other a-g approved classes, such as BYU and Edgenuity.
River Oaks offers 3 pathways on the ROA campuses (Hospitaly, Legal and Networking) and works with the County’s CEC program to offer access to all pathways that are offered within the County. Many of the pathway classes are articulated with the junior colleges, where our students get credit not only at the high school level, but also at the college one. Our students are encouraged to incorporate their passions into their course of study in form of electives, and we continuously create new courses for our students.
We also offer a wide choice of on site workshops and classes to help students find their passion or to expand their passions as well as academic support classes, such as the academic writing classes; the math workshops; the science lab classes and more. We offer daily “Focus Rooms”, “Math Labs” and “ELA Labs” to support our students in those areas. These study halls are open to all students who want extra support and the rooms are always staffed with specialists and teachers.
This year, we have implemented additional math support in accordance with our LCAP goal to improve our math achievement across all grades (Goal #3). We are now offering 2 weekly math classes on our sites as well as additional math labs and math tutoring. We have also implemented our “Junior’s Club”, where we invite all our junior students to join to have an opportunity to mingle and prepare for the state mandated testing. The juniors last year showed a tremendous improvement in their math scores on CAASPP and we attribute that largely to the “Junior Club” and the hard work they put in. We also offer SAT prep in math and language arts and continue to offer the PSAT 10, PSAT 11 and SAT testing for free to all of our students as an incentive to get them to take the test and with that to practice test taking and improve test taking skills.
This year, due to the dire need of many of our students, we have developed an entire Social-emotional Learning component. We are now not only offering monthly hand-outs to our families, but also have established a weekly workshop called “Parliament” which addresses all kinds of social emotional needs our students have, including how to deal with frustration and anxiety, empathy and much more. We are also offering a Parent Education series, which offers speakers each month discussing different topics that deal with the social emotional needs of our students.
We have two resource centers, one at the WaterCourt in Westlake Village and one at the Seabridge Marina in Oxnard. We have experienced tremendous growth at both sites. We are currently showing over 100 high school students between the two sites.