At our independent school, excellence is not a skill, it’s an attitude. We welcome elementary students from Pre-Kindergarten to fifth grade. The inspiring atmosphere at our school provides students with a well-rounded education and an insatiable love of learning. The faculty implements multiage grouping, a customized curriculum, enrichment classes, wise decision making, and critical and creative thinking strategies. We balance our academics with an integration of Art, Music, Physical Education, Yoga, and Spanish to promote healthy social and emotional growth. Academy of Academic Excellence, a unique elementary school located in Richmond, VA, is ready to embrace you!
Founded in 1997 by Rita Busch, owner and Dean, the school serves elementary students of varying abilities and cultural backgrounds. Our customized curriculum offers a challenging atmosphere for academically advanced children and support for those in need of academic strengthening. Academy of Academic Excellence is one of the few private elementary schools in Richmond, VA that accepts full day Pre-K students and helps them grow in a nurturing and caring atmosphere.
Mission & Vision
“Intelligence is not what you know but what you do when you don’t know.” — Albert Einstein
Mission
The Academy’s purpose is to create an effective and collaborative learning environment that includes a variety of programs customized to enhance each child’s talents, abilities, interests, potential, and refinement areas. To maintain teacher accountability in selecting objectives to differentiate for the appropriate level of difficulty, and to monitor and adjust while inspiring within each child a life-long love of learning.
Vision
The Academy of Academic Excellence believes that every child possesses distinct talents. Its climate is one that inspires creativity, encourages curiosity, supports thinking outside the box, exposes children to innovative ideas, teaches wise decision-making and problem-solving abilities, instills leadership skills and good citizenship, empowers students to express their points of view, and cultivates an insatiable love of learning.
The school fosters an environment that offers a tremendous wealth of learning strategies for Pre-Kindergarten to fifth graders. With a low student/teacher ratio, our school seeks to identify the learning style of each student and utilizes a variety of techniques such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, questioning, collaboration, and graphic organizers that strengthen high-level thinking skills and develop unique ways of looking at information.
The Academy of Academic Excellence embraces multicultural students from diverse backgrounds. The world is our classroom where academics, fine arts, foreign language, technology, physical education, and 21st century skills are expertly woven together by integrating talents of master artisans, students, faculty, families and our community.
From the Dean’s Desk
We’re small, and we like it that way. The Academy of Academic Excellence is unlike any other private school in Richmond. We are dedicated to differentiating our curriculum, implementing multiage grouping, and offering enrichment classes to ensure our students meet success in the classroom and beyond.
What is DIFFERENTIATED CURRICULUM? Deliberate adaptation and modification of the curriculum. The Academy achieves this by building its curriculum to be: Accelerated, Complex, In depth, Challenging, Creative, Conceptual.
The Academy differentiated curriculum reaches far beyond that of a standard elementary school. Academy students continually achieve above and beyond the equivalent grade requirements of neighboring public and private schools. Many graduates are tracked into advanced classes and gifted programs once they transfer to other schools.
Why MULTIAGE GROUPING at AAE? Research shows that all students placed in multiage environments will accelerate a minimum of one full academic year. While students are grouped with their same age peers for emotional and social growth, during select times of the day they are grouped by ability level which allows students to be met at their appropriate level of difficulty.
What are AAE’s ENRICHMENT CLASSES? Our students participate in diverse activities such as daily Spanish, weekly student dissertations, Accelerated Reader, Mathbusters, chess club, sports clinics, art lessons, photography, juggling, magic, and Yoga, among others. Innovative programs such as a student-run mini-economy (where students balance checkbooks and shop at our school store) and an Invention Convention successfully introduce the students to concepts and skills typically reserved for older students.
We are proud that our school is small; our size allows us the flexibility to create this extraordinary learning environment. We excel at helping children to prosper and build a positive self concept, to recognize and develop their talents and to accept their refinement areas with ease.
Respectfully yours,
Rita T. Busch, Owner & Dean
Students’ Bill of Rights
Not everyone needs to do the same work at the same time.
Students will learn as much from each other as they will from the teacher.
Students must take responsibility for their own learning.
There are many paths to an answer.
Often, there are many right answers.
Mistakes can be valuable learning experiences.
If it is easy, you are probably not learning very much.
Special thanks to Peabody school for intellectually advanced students in Charlottesville, Virginia.
