The Need

Our History

The groundwork for Hope Academy started over a decade before it’s opening. In 1995, Grace Community Church relocated to a facility in Glenwood. Over the years since then, several Grace families have made their home in Glenwood, building relationships with their neighbors and creating education and enrichment programs for the children who live there.

As the years went on, the number of children increased and the programs grew larger, so a non-profit, Glenwood Family Ministries, was formed. The creation of this organization provided greater fundraising opportunities, as well as more focused long-term vision and direction. Included in the long-term vision of Glenwood Family Ministries was the foundation of a school to serve the students in Glenwood.

In the spring of 2011, the GFM Board of Directors formed a development team made of educators, tutors, parents and other neighborhood stakeholders to plan the direction of the school. After much discussion, prayer and consideration, it was determined that Hope Academy would begin as a private, Christ-centered middle school. Hope Academy currently serves grades 5-8th, with plans to add elementary grades in future years.

The Need

All data above was gathered from the 2010 Census and/or Department of Education data. As you can see, students living along the the Florida Street corridor are:

15x more likely to live in poverty.

13x more likely to be a minority.

15x more likely to have dropped out of high school.

13x less likely to have a college degree.

50x more likely to not have a car available to their family.

7-12x more likely to have an unemployed parent.

Equality of Opportunity

According to the Equality of Opportunity Project, which started in 2011 with a goal of ensuring the “American Dream” for all children, “A defining feature of the “American Dream” is upward income mobility: the ideal that children have a higher standard of living than their parents. Our work shows that children’s prospects of earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% to 50% over the past half century.”

Of the 100 metropolitan areas studied, the Piedmont of North Carolina had some of the lowest Economic Mobility:

Equality of Opportunity: Hope’s Experience

Having worked with the neighborhood youth for ten years, we are very familiar with the impact of generational poverty. Here are some of the ways poverty affects the children of Glenwood:

90% have heard gunshots on their streets.
85% have never been to Friendly Shopping Center or visited UNCG (only 1.5 miles from Hope)
For many, no one in their family graduated from high school.
Prior to attendance at Hope, most of the students did not own a book.

Schools in areas that are historically impoverished perform significantly below the rest of Guilford County Schools and the North Carolina state average. Of the students enrolled in the Glenwood Tutoring Program:

0% passed the 5th grade EOG in science.
25% passed the EOG in language arts.
50% passed the EOG in math.
75% are at least one or more grade levels behind in reading.
83% of all the Glenwood Tutoring students failed at least one EOG.