Dean Rita Busch

Mrs. Busch is an award-winning effective teaching specialist with a strong and diversified background of 50 years of experience in both the Science of Teaching (curriculum development) and the Art of Teaching (inspiring lifelong learners). As owner and dean of the school, she exemplifies passion and dedication to excellence in teaching effective practices to the curious child. She has proven her ability to excel at piloting new and innovative materials as a way to extract wonderful learning ideas for her students while building a firm foundation in academic and social skills.

Mrs. Busch has studied under the late Effective Teaching guru, Madeline Hunter. Rita has done past graduate study in England at Matlock College where she explored the Montessori teaching method. Her formal education is from the State University of Geneseo in 1964-1968 and Brockport University in upstate New York in 1969-1971. Now involved in the Virginia Educational System, she continues to offer her expertise by serving on the SACS Accreditation Quality Review Team, visiting and recognizing schools that are applying for accreditation.

Rita states, “The secret to improving education in the 21st century is presenting an array of high level questions to young learners daily to train their inquisitive brains to comprehend, synthesize, analyze, and innovate.” As such, she instructs onsite training for her staff on understanding and applying Bloom’s Taxonomy on higher level thinking skills.

Rita Busch considers all children gifted and talented, and AAE helps children discover their unique talents and learn how to use them for their personal growth as well as growth as a community member. Rita supports the use of technology in the curriculum, and all classrooms are now equipped with Promethean interactive whiteboards to encourage overt and covert active participation in daily instruction. Rita has highly developed communication and organizational skills and is extremely self-motivated.

Under her leadership skills, students hear Rita declare, “Work hard to play hard!”, “Kiss your brain and take a bow,” for moments of wonderment, and “show a neat work ethic and demonstrate positive peer pressure skills!”

Mrs. Busch believes:

“Intelligence is not what you know, but what you do when you don’t know!” ~ Albert Einstein