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Preparing a generation for a lifetime of exploration

A Place to Thrive

Atlas Elementary is a new school for curious, creative, and compassionate kids. Located in the heart of St. Louis, we offer kindergarten through third grade for the 2023-2024 school year. As our students grow, we will too by adding a grade level each year until we are a K-5 school.

At Atlas, we instill a love of learning in our kids while empowering them to build a healthy future for themselves, our community, and the world. We believe children learn best through authentic, hands-on experiences. Our integrated approach to teaching helps our students make real-world connections and ignites their imaginations.
Click Here to Apply Now!
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Join the Movement

We know that your child's school is one of the most important decisions you make as a family. Get to know us!
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It is easy to connect with Atlas! We offer in-person, group tours of Atlas every Wednesday from 8:30-9:30 am. Reserve your spot and come see what we're all about!
Click Here to Book a Tour!
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FREE Kindergarten Readiness Kits

Atlas Public Schools wants to ensure local families are prepared for the transition to Kindergarten. We’re offering free Kindergarten Readiness kits to St. Louis City families with preschool-aged children (3-5-year-olds) who are not yet in Kindergarten. These kits include hands-on activities and supplies to help kids develop essential literacy, math, social-emotional, and motor skills. Sign up today!
Reserve your Free Kit
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Place-Based Learning

At Atlas, we believe students learn best when they are engaged in experiences that are relevant and exciting. By anchoring the learning in real-world topics and authentic experiences, we give students the opportunity to work collaboratively, think critically, and be true problem solvers. We take advantage of all St. Louis offers by connecting what students learn inside the classroom to our local history, environment, culture, and economy. 

Our students have visited MADE Magic House, Circus Flora, Forest Park’s Nature Playscape, Saint Louis Zoo, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and Litzsinger Road Ecology Center, to name a few places. The possibilities for students to direct their own learning are endless!

The Atlas Difference

Real-World Experiences

Learning happens everywhere. We immerse our students in the local St. Louis community and provide opportunities for authentic hands-on learning experiences.  This helps our kids discover their passions, develop their skills, and learn about our world and themselves.
 
The major question facing schools across the county is how to best prepare our children for the ever-changing world they are entering. Students must develop the skills, understandings, and mindsets necessary to prepare them for the careers and challenges of tomorrow. We know that students need multiple and varied strategic opportunities to explore, practice, and perfect 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. Children learn by doing and emphasizing hands-on, real-world experiences makes learning more meaningful to students and helps lessons stick. For these reasons, Atlas strives to connect lessons learned in the classroom with authentic, place-based learning experiences. 

Place-based learning is the process of using the local community and environment as both a starting point for inquiry and as a context for exploring and applying concepts and skills across the curriculum.  Place-based education weaves together concepts from English Language Arts, math, science, social studies, and the arts, rather than teaching them exclusively in isolation.

Year-Round Education

Our year-round school calendar supports our comprehensive whole-child approach to learning.  From academics, play, the arts, wellness, and social-emotional learning, we are committed to ensuring the success of our students - academically, emotionally, and physically.
 
Most public schools in the United States operate on a 10-month calendar, starting around September and ending in May or June. This school schedule became the default when children needed to work in the fields during the summer. However, the 10-month school calendar no longer fits the needs of most American children or families. The Atlas Founding Team conducted focus groups, met with parents one-on-one, and surveyed families--the vast majority of whom indicated that they struggle to find quality child care options during the summer months. In addition, many educators, including the Founders of Atlas, worry about a phenomenon known as the “summer slide”. This is the tendency for students, especially those from low-income families, to lose some of the achievement gains they made during the previous school year. Research dated as far back as the 1980s era shows wider disparities in test scores between children from low-income and high-income families after the summer holiday. There is ample evidence showing that low-income children are especially vulnerable during summer months when they lose access to important social services such as food and childcare. 
 
In response to these academic and socio-emotional concerns, Atlas adopted a year-round school calendar. During intersession breaks, families have access to community organizations for additional support for childcare, food, and other social services.  Intersession breaks also allow teachers and support the time to work collaboratively with their teams to internalize and strengthen lessons for the next academic session.  Atlas’ year-round calendar builds in 30 full days of teacher inservice each school year. 
 
Below is Atlas' 2022-2023 School Calendar.
 

Diverse-by-Design

At Atlas, we see the diversity of our community as a source of strength and key to our success in educating culturally empathetic global citizens.  Atlas' students come from all over St. Louis!  Each child will be welcomed, affirmed, and cared for, receiving the personalized instruction needed to thrive.

Co-Taught Classrooms

At Atlas, we believe all kids should receive the personalized instruction they need to flourish.  In order to set our students up for success, each of our classes are co-taught by two educators.  This gives teachers the flexibility to personalize instruction and help each child reach their individual goals.
 
Below are a few specific scenarios of what this will look like at different times throughout the day:
 
-  Both teachers co-teaching the same lesson with all students working on a similar project or task
 
-  One teacher supports two or three students while the other teacher leads the larger group-  Students working in four groups of six or seven students; students rotate between four stations;  two of the stations are led by a teacher, and two of the stations are student-directed
 
-  The class is split into two groups of roughly thirteen students, and each group is taught by one of the teachers
One teacher leads a whole group lesson while the other teacher circulates the room offering support where needed
 
-  Both teachers pulling either individual students or small groups while all other students work on an independent assignment
 
Our co-teacher model allows for more flexibility and enables our teachers to personalize instruction and ensure all students are actively engaged in the learning.  We're able to provide both enrichment and remediation within the classroom and do so in a way that maintains the dignity of all students.  It also allows us to support our students with special needs in an environment that is more inclusive and without stigma.

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