The Hamilton County Board of Education has officially approved the charter for ChattAcademy Community School, a sixth through 12th grade school that will have a two-way immersion bilingual model for Spanish and English. This model will make ChattAcademy the only tuition free, public school in East Tennessee offering a bilingual model, and it will provide a new option for families in Hamilton County.
The school also plans to utilize a problem and place-based curriculum supplemented by a critical service-learning and character development program.
The school will open in August of 2023 by welcoming in sixth and seventh grade students, with plans to add a new grade level each year after that until fully grown, with a graduating class in the spring of 2029.
Lead Founder and Executive Director Nolan McDaniel is an East Tennessee native and the son of an over three-decade Tennessee public school teacher and principal.
On his inspiration to found a new school, he says, “I often joke with people that my siblings and I spent more time in a school building growing up than we did at home because of my parents’ work. We were raised on the power of community, so it has been a dream come true to design ChattAcademy alongside the community. Our model was completely grassroots in nature, and we were committed from the start to listen to families, parents, students and community members on what new option they were looking for in a school.”
The ChattAcademy Founding Team consists of Board Chair Bill Rush, the executive director of Metropolitan Ministries; Katrina Chesney, the lead recruiter at TVFCU; Eduardo Rosano, the CFO at the Partnership for Families, Children and Adults; Dr. Lynn Purkey, the associate department head of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; and Elijah Anderson Barrera, an instructor of Spanish and English as a foreign language at The Baylor School. The team is looking to actively grow in the coming months.
Mr. McDaniel is a graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law and Teachers College at Columbia University. On his personal connection to their design, he says, “My two little brothers are both native Spanish speakers; one is Guatemalan-American and the other is Mexican-American. To design a school that would have specifically celebrated their immense assets as bilingual learners is above and beyond what I ever dreamed of doing.”
"One goal of the school is to graduate 100 percent of their students with the Tennessee Seal of Biliteracy, regardless of which language is a student’s native language," officials said. "The goal would be to have a student body that is 50 percent native Spanish speakers and 50 percent native English speakers to foster an environment where both groups are learning from one another on their way to true bilingualism and biliteracy."
For more information and ways to get involved, visit the school website at chattacademy.org. The school can also be found on Instagram as chatt_academy and is also on Facebook.