About
Kestrel Heights Charter School is a small, diverse, and inclusive learning community in Durham that empowers our Scholars to sharpen academic knowledge, demonstrate creative expression and expand leadership abilities to prepare for success in high school, college, and beyond.
Parents, families, and staff are appreciative of our school’s relatively small size. We have no plans to expand enrollment substantially over the roughly 500 students we have now. Our small size ensures that there are no strangers in our building. Every student feels like they are part of a close community. Every student has multiple adults looking after him or her.
Kestrel Heights is diverse in the most literal sense of the word. We are diverse racially and ethnically. Indeed, we have students and staff from North Carolina, different parts of the country, and from many different continents. We are diverse in our religious beliefs, some of our scholar’s families are very devout while others have no religious beliefs at all. We are diverse in the age and experience range of teachers on staff. We celebrate our diversity in everything we do, and our community is truly an inclusive one where each person has an opportunity to succeed, be supported, and have his or her voice heard. As much as we value our diversity, it is our inclusiveness that makes our community a good and just place to learn.
We are proud to be located in Durham. Durham has a compelling, rich, and multifaceted history that inspires the work we do every day. We believe that our school and our students will play a vital role in shaping Durham’s future. That is a responsibility that we accept with optimism and sincerity.
We teach our students, we work with them as they grow physically and emotionally, and we aspire to be positive role models for our students. The desired end result of that work is scholars who are truly empowered to navigate this complicated world as they grow into adolescence, into teenage years and young adulthood. Our students are not just passively along for the ride of elementary school and middle school. Our scholars are empowered and have agency over their thoughts, choices, and actions.
Naturally, the primary responsibility of any school is student learning. Student performance in literacy and numeracy are the ultimate benchmarks upon which our school is evaluated by local and state authorizers. At Kestrel Heights, however, we are more motivated by each individual student’s educational growth than we are by the average test score of all our students. Since all of our students arrive with skills to grow upon, we will empower our scholars to sharpen their academic knowledge.
We value traditional academic subjects and we are committed to expanding each child’s knowledge base. We are also focused on educating the whole child. Our specials classes, our electives courses, our extra-curricular club activities, and our athletic teams provide students with the vital outlets to learn and grow outside of the classroom. Our scholars employ these outlets to problem solve, think differently, and work with teammates to accomplish common goals. Thus, our scholars are empowered to demonstrate creative expression.
Finally, our scholars are empowered to expand leadership abilities. We believe that every child in the Kestrel Heights community has innate leadership ability. That ability can be manifested in many different ways. We have scholars who are more reserved and quietly lead by example. We have scholars who are more gregarious and inspire their peers with their charisma and enthusiasm. We have some scholars who lead by wisely choosing who to follow and when. Everyone has a role to play, and everyone has an opportunity to step up and be a leader in one way or another.
