For more than 13 years, Desert Sands Unified School District (DSUSD) has been at the forefront in building, maintaining, and growing learning environments. DSUSD’s Horizon brick and mortar facility continues to meet the needs of athletes, actors, missionaries, students with emotional struggles, etc.

While Horizon School meets the needs of students from kindergarten to 12th grade, each of whom has benefitted from our independent studies program, this article focuses on the middle school children.  Each middle school program provides one-to-one teacher instruction, a wonderful blended learning curriculum fused with core materials and learning management systems providing a true multimodal instructional environment. Horizon’s whole child approach offers a variety of engagement opportunities for students and parents: Back to School Night, College Night, career fair, awards ceremonies, free tutoring, and an administrative open door policy.

Horizon’s Home School’s 7th and 8th graders have shown promise by registering the greatest gains in ELA (English language arts) 7th grade 43 points and 8th grade 79 points) and math (7th grade 39 points and 8th grade 81 points) among all middle schools in Desert Sands Unified School District. Horizon middle students registering as meeting and exceeding state standards increased from 33% and 7% in 7th and 8th grades to 25% and 30% respectively.

In the area of math, the gains were 39 and 81 point increases in 7th and 8th grade.  Students meeting and exceeding standards in this area rose from a mere 8% in 7th grade to 25% in English language arts, and from 7% to 15% in math.

It is important to highlight that Horizon’s middle school programs consist of both an independent studies program where there is a greater home-to-school investment and a middle school opportunity program populated by a number of students who struggle academically and behaviorally. The instructional focus of both home school teachers (Belinda Salandro and Michelle Horel) and our intervention teacher (Teresa Adams) are to be commended.

Horizon offers another option for families looking for additional  flexibility and safety. Horizon School believes that if a student requires a unique instructional format, then we will teach them in the manner in which they learn best.

Again, Horizon’s staff welcomes the larger community  to visit our facility for a personal tour. Thank you for taking an interest in Horizon School.

Image Sources

  • Horizon School: DSUSD