John Hope Community Academy, at 5515 South Lowe Avenue, opened up in the fall of 1972 as a community middle school. The school has changed throughout the years and is currently John Hope College Preparatory High School with a single 8th grade class but will become solely a 4-year high school for the 2007-2008 school year.

 

Vision
By instilling desire, dedication, and discipline, we envision moving students forward. We seek to foster and encourage individual creativity, self-directed learning, and responsible decision-making. Our aim is to create life-long learners who can compete successfully in a technological society, and who will be productive, caring, and contributing citizens.

 

Mission
To be successful, we must design our school to address the needs of students indicative of our population. We will create the desire to excel and establish a professional, respectful, caring, student-centered environment, committed to high standards of literacy and "Excellence Without Excuses."

As posted in our latest CPS scorecard there were 989 students enrolled at Hope. The average rate of absence for students is 15.3, which ranks us 14 in the city. 93.4% of the students came from low-income homes. 98% of the school is black and 2% are Hispanic. Our average class size is 21.7. The average composition score for the ACT is 17.4, which is 10 out of 62 schools.

The school provides a variety of instructional models (inclusion, resource, continuum, and self-contained special classes with mainstreaming) to serve its special education (approximately 15%) population. The Intervention Team is used to provide support and assistance to students, parents, and faculty. Currently, 2% of our students receive English as Second Language (ESL) resource services.

Hope implements a very enriched curriculum to all of its students. The school incorporates a “House” concept. The school is composed of five houses made up of one or more teams. Each team works as a unit in identifying particular curricular, instructional, and other ancillary needs pertinent to a particular student. The school also tries to implement small student-to-teacher class ratios. The school staff is currently exploring modifications and reassessing its needs in order to integrate more reading, writing, and math instructional activities throughout the curriculum.

Our "Excellence Without Excuses" motto comes from our recognition of socio-economic barriers faced by our students and our commitment to overcome them. The school demands dedication by our faculty, staff, administration, and most of all our parents and students enrolled in the school. We are a college preparatory high school with an eye on the future.

AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) is offered as an elective course that meets regularly. AVID is designed to increase school-wide learning and performance. The mission of AVID is to ensure that all students, and most especially, the least served students "in the middle". The focus of AVID is to prepare students for college level work by strengthening their writing, reading and analytical thinking skills. AVID students participate in tutorials twice a week with college tutors, take college tours, and research post-secondary education and financial aide sources.

John Hope was recently selected as a CPS Transformation school.