Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Vogel.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Amanda. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Education is our passion, and providing the best in education is our obsession. Vine started as an extension of Nurturing Wisdom Tutoring, which has provided one on one, in-home tutoring to thousands of students across Chicagoland for the last twelve years. We were so proud of the amazing results we received in helping students earn high marks on the ACT, get into the high school of their choice, develop executive functioning skills, and much more, but, something was missing. It’s so rewarding to help a student with one tough class or test. Other times though, tutoring can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. We realized what some of these students needed wasn’t tutoring but a different approach to learning. Our dream to start our own school was born.
We started to look closely at the students who didn’t seem to be best served by traditional schools. We saw gifted students who were not working to their potential, children who had been inquisitive in their elementary years but had lost their intellectual curiosity, and lots of students who were falling behind at school not because they were missing the knowledge or skills, but because of waning motivation and lack of executive functioning skills. We sought to develop a school that would customize to every student, teach executive functioning skills, and provide the rigorous academic study. We wanted to create a culture that would foster a growth mindset, the pursuit of passions and interests, and children who encourage each other rather than compare each other.
From this reflection and research, we designed Vine Academy. We took the best of everything we could find in traditional and alternative education formats and sought to address every major weakness we saw in traditional schools. We designed our school for students whose amazing potential was not being actualized. We are now in our sixth year and are very proud of the results of this endeavor!
Has it been a smooth road?
I’m pretty sure that no business faces a smooth road on its journey. What we’ve created in the school is the product of relentless hard work. When we started out, we wanted to question everything. We wanted to ask, “Why is it done that way?” about everything that we see as “typical” in schools. If a practice can be validated as useful, efficient, and beneficial for children, we kept it. If not, we went back to the drawing board. From there, we have been dedicated to creating not only our own approach but a complete, proprietary curriculum. We don’t just design the format of the school, we design everything down to our lessons from scratch. Nothing about that is easy, but it’s worth it.
Additionally, our school is a business, and we are customer-service oriented. That means that we aim to really listen to our parent’s praise, suggestions, and concerns. This is not just about making the customer happy; it’s about really listening to the wisdom of our parents and understanding that they know when something isn’t working for their child. When that happens, it’s our job to adjust. It can take a lot of creative thinking and willingness to make changes, but this responsiveness has helped us grow and improve.
Finally, growth as a small, private school is tough. We started out with eleven students on day one, and we have steadily added each year. It would be fun to say that we grew in leaps and bounds, but there’s no overnight success story here. Our growth has been exactly as we expected it: slow and steady. We only add about ten students each year. Nothing matters more in a school than the teachers and having a staff that is passionate, enthusiastic, and eager to continue their own learning is critical to us. To make that happen, we pursue a slow, steady growth.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Vine Academy is a private K-12 school located in Hinsdale. We use very small class sizes for classes that are skills based, such as literature, writing, and math, but we have more traditional sized classes for content areas like history and science. Mixed in with that, we provide a customized education for each child, a significant amount of daily instruction in project-based learning, executive functioning instruction in all classes, and a deep focus on writing across the curriculum. We are very proud of the thousands and thousands of pages of quality literature our students read each year, the strong foundation that they receive in how to study, take notes and stay organized, and the high-level instruction that they receive in writing, mathematics, history, and science. Mixed with that though, we’re especially proud of achieving this rigor without anxiety or homework.
We believe that parents don’t have to choose between a high-quality academic education and their child’s mental health. The American education system has not shown any significant improvement in academic outcomes over the last few decades, but more and more of our children are suffering from anxiety. What has changed is an increase in working hours outside of school, taxing our children’s mental and psychological energy. In fact, the rate of clinical anxiety among children has been increasing steadily for three decades. Students are spending countless hours doing homework and schoolwork that is burdensome, but not stimulating or challenging. More work does not mean better work; children crave intellectual stimulation but find themselves overwhelmed by long lists of relatively boring tasks.
Similarly, homework teaches very little, creating far more problems than it solves. Arguments, late nights, stress, and time away from essential childhood activities are all consequences of homework, and research continues to show they are not worth it. When our students leave school in the afternoon, we have created conditions so that they can go home and relax, spend time with family, and participate in a variety of after-school activities. They are ready for homework in later years, though, because we teach them to sustain focus to a task, produce quality work, and meet deadlines during school hours.
At Vine, we believe that children are best able to learn in a comfortable, relaxed state of mind. Our intentionally low-stress, homework-free structure supports a rigorous education beneficial to each of our students.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
We have found an extremely welcoming home in the western suburbs! People have welcomed us with the recognition that there are many differences among learners and that we need more educational options for our children. It has been wonderful to be so well received even when we were first starting out.
Contact Info:
- Address: 125 S. Vine Hinsdale, IL
- Website: www.vineacademy.com
- Phone: 630-423-5916
- Email: info@vineacademy.com
Image Credit:
Amy Tripple
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