Last Thursday was a quiet but momentous milestone for the community of Two Rivers Public Charter School. It was the school’s very first graduation day. Eighteen eighth graders were awarded diplomas and showered with advice and words of wisdom for the future while parents, teachers and administrators beamed with pride.

A few of the kids were founding students of the school. When Two Rivers opened its doors in the fall of 2004 the school went from preschool through third grades. There was only one class of third graders and it had about twelve kids, a contrast to today as the school has waiting lists into the hundreds. Each year a grade was added and was finally complete this school year. Recruiting older kids was a challenge and kids came and went over the years but the class remained a close knit group.

The school uses Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound as its curriculum model. Yes, that Outward Bound with the ropes and the team building and such, so as you might expect the educational approach is very “hands on”. Subjects are taught via two large expeditions a year, one in math and one in science. There are “big ideas” that the kids are expected to take away from this exploration and the students become “experts” in their current area of study. When possible, other subjects are taught using ideas from the expedition.
In 2004, families were taking a chance and trusting their children to a new and promising but unproven school.  Two Rivers did not even have a location for much of that summer until a last minute deal with DCPS allowed the school to co-locate with the then under-enrolled Eliot Middle School on Constitution Avenue behind Eastern High School (Now the school has absorbed the students from the former Hine Junior High School and is now called Eliot-Hine Middle School.)

The school spent two and a half years at Eliot and then moved to its own bright and modern facility at 4th and Florida, NE, near Gallaudet University during the 2006/2007 school year. As each year passed, that once-spacious building quickly became crowded and this year the middle school building opened across the street from the elementary school, equipped with such cool big kid things like lockers, a real gym and a sharp roof deck.

Those little third graders from 2004 have grown into MUCH taller young men and women, all of whom seemed to tower over much of the faculty and yours truly. Since Two Rivers is a public charter school, there is no high school to feed into and the diverse possibilities of Washington were open to them. These graduates are headed to a variety of Washington area public, private and public charter high schools such as School Without Walls, Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Washington Latin Public Charter School, Capital City Public Charter School, DeMatha Catholic High School and others.

For the founding teachers and parents who took that leap on a promise in 2004, graduation day was a day filled with pride.  James Loots, father of Mason who transferred into that first class of third graders, expressed this when he said, “We all shared a tremendous pride at being part of the first graduating class, looking back on the growth and experience, the trials, failures, successes and lessons learned both by the students and the school.  I have no doubt that the institution celebrates this milestone with as much meaning as the students, in that the Two Rivers learning path is now complete.”

Jen DeMayo is the mother of two children who attend Two Rivers.