Phillip Schwenk, the founding head of school at Rutherford Classical Academy, announced that the charter school will be located in La Vergne on Ingram Boulevard, close to I-24, and will accept 340 students the first school year.
The Rutherford County School Board voted last April to approve the building of the charter school by a vote of 5-2.
Schwenk said the school has been accepting enrollment applications for the 2024-25 school year since December 2023. The first application window closes on March 1 before a public lottery is potentially held.
“The way that public school systems work is if we have more than 340 by March 1st, then we have to have a public lottery so that everybody has an opportunity to get in. If it’s less than that, then you get an automatic seat and then it just stays open. Then it just becomes a wait list as it goes over 340,” Schwenk said on Tuesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy.
Rutherford Classical Academy will teach students a curriculum provided by Hillsdale College, a Michigan-based private school championed for its “1776 Curriculum,” which “teaches students about the strengths of America and the Western tradition.”
“What sets us apart really is that the way that we look at education is different from what we’re seeing in a lot of public schools today. We have what’s called a program guide, which is provided by Hillsdale College,” Schwenk explained. “I’ve been a public educator for almost 30 years, and it’s the strongest curriculum I’ve ever seen. It’s well rounded…Obviously, we want our students to be intellectually sound. They can read, write, speak, do mathematics well, history, science, those types of things. But it’s also dedicated to making sure that our kids are good. So one of the things that classical schools focus on is what we call the good, the true, and the beautiful.”
In regards to finding teachers to not only teach the curriculum but embody the same values, Schwenk said there is a “whole pool of teachers that are very interested in this.”
“When you talk about a teacher in this space, it’s their life, their heart, their mind, dedicated, habituated to these behaviors,” Schwenk said. “There’s plenty of people here in this country that do that, it’s just that we haven’t been training them for that. So a lot of times you find teachers that I think their life in general is dedicated to what we think is important, these eternal values, these things of truth and goodness, but there may need to be some kind of calibration to what our work is but there’s definitely a growing amount of teachers that are in that space there’s a lot of teachers that are kind of in spaces that they kind of feel out of place.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Phillip Schwenk” by Phillip Schwenk.
