The Shelby County School Board has officially approved University Middle, making it the third University of Memphis sponsored school.
UofM President M. David Rudd expressed his approval in a campus-wide email.
“Our hope is to continue to serve as a model of educational innovation and effectiveness, providing empirically supported approaches that can be scaled out to the general Shelby County Schools system,” Rudd said in the email.
The agreement is based on a five-year contract. The goal is for 60 sixth graders to enroll for the school’s inaugural semester, Fall 2019. The projected enrollment for following semesters is roughly 90 students. By 2021, the school hopes to have roughly 270 students in sixth through eighth grade.
The eligibility criteria consists of three conditions: satisfactory behavior, fewer than 15 unexcused absences or tardies and grade level scores on the TNReady test or MAPS.
Before approval, Rudd discussed the intention behind University Middle.
“The goal is to create a cutting-edge educational program that both capitalizes on the rich resources at the University of Memphis and stands as a model of innovation for a middle school education,” Rudd said. “It will also aim to expand the idea of what a laboratory school can be.”
Last year, Rudd said he hopes the UofM will one day affiliate themselves with grades kindergarten through 12th. The UofM said University Middle will “physically extend the main campus and reinforce efforts to enhance the south side of campus.”
University Middle was originally supposed to be hosted inside what used to be St. Anne Catholic School near Highland Street and Spottswood Avenue.
“Apparently, the deal breaker was the morality clause, which would have prohibited them from conducting any program in our facility that would be objectionable to our Christian faith,” a St. Anne memo stated.
Officials are now searching for a new facility.
The UofM is currently teamed up with Barbara K. Lipman Early Learning and Research Center, a program offered for children in Pre-K and kindergarten. The UofM is also affiliated with Campus Elementary School, a laboratory school available for children ranging from first to fifth grade. University Middle hopes to receive their influx of students from Campus Elementary.
According to the press report, the school is intended to work as a “bridge between the University and community, strengthening the ties between the campus and the diverse neighborhoods around us.”
The UofM is aiming for one third of the students to be children of the staff, a third to come from a two-mile radius of the school and a third to come from somewhere else in the district with the goal is to help diversify the school’s roster.
