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About Our School
About Mr. Fortes
About Our Museum
About Our Grants
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About Mr. Fortes |
Our school is dedicated to the memory of the West End resident who, in founding the Providence Corporation and serving as director of the Urban Education Center was a leader in promoting Civil Rights for all City residents.
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About Our Museum |
The Museum Project began in 1999 when administration and staff at the Charles Fortes Magnet Academy decided to work with students to create a museum, using it’s building and neighborhood’s histories as springboards to curiosity, research and presentation. The building, formerly a factory built in 1866, produced at various times, cotton sheeting, braided goods and electronic products. The West Elmwood neighborhood was and is home for immigrants and working people including those from German, Irish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, African American, Dominican, Guatemalan, Columbian, Puerto Rican, Cambodian and H’mong backgrounds. Additionally, there was a 17th Century Narragansett Indian settlement on a pond in the neighborhood and some Narragansetts still call the area home.
Using the building and the neighborhood directly or tangentially as starting points, students and teachers formulate questions that they pursue throughout the year. These questions generate hypotheses tested throughout the year in a variety of ways including oral histories, interviews with scholars, first and second person texts, physical objects and the Internet. Once the research is completed students, teachers and artists create an exhibit for the museum.
Museum Project Philosophy
The underlying philosophy of the Museum Project is called Site Specific Education. Created by Project Director, Marc Levitt, this philosophy looks to a school’s physical, sociological and/or psychological environment as a place from where question asking, research, literacy and math standards can be taught. Because we find our questions at least initially in the everyday environment of our building and neighborhood, students and their neighbors become experts, their experiences valued and the daily environment becomes a site for continuously generating questions. Site Specific Education also prioritizes authentic forms of presentation, so that students can have a meaningful purpose for perfecting skills as well as ‘real world’ models to emulate. At Charles Fortes, when students work with artists to create exhibits they are unifying disciplines, reinforcing knowledge, utilizing multiple forms of intelligence, learning to edit, summarize and creating opportunities for critical thinking and problem solving.
Funding for the Museum
Museum Project funding has come from the Disney Learning Partnership, the Elizabeth and Buff Chase/United Way of Southern New England Foundation, Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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About Our Grants |
March 2004 - Reading First
Reading First is a focused nationwide effort to enable all students to become successful early readers
Funds are dedicated to help states and local school districts eliminate the reading deficit by establishing high-quality,comprehensive reading instruction in kindergarten through grade 3.
Building on a solid foundation of research, the program is designed to select, implement, and provide professional development for teachers using scientifically based reading programs, and to ensure accountability through ongoing, valid and reliable screening, diagnostic, and classroom-based assessment.
Museum Project
funding has come from the Disney Learning Partnership, the Elizabeth and Buff Chase/United Way of Southern New England Foundation, Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
April 2002 - National Endowment for the Humanities
A Schools for a New Millennium project in a magnet elementary school in Providence, Rhode Island, chronicling school and neighborhood history.
Disney Learning Partnership
The projects supported by the grant funds represent innovative, highly promising approaches to improve student performance and to inspire the joy of learning in children." Disney Learning Partnership In November 1999 the selection committee for Disney Learning Partnership's Creative Learning communities grant program contacted the Charles N. Fortes Magnet Academy as one of its grant recipients. The grant is one of 18 awards that will support 32 schools nationwide. Over three years the Fortes Magnet Academy will receive $300,000 to support the Fortes Museum Project. The site of Fortes Magnet Academy has been productively used for hundreds of years, from its early days as a Native American settlement to farmland for European immigrants in the 1700's to a series of industrial uses well into the 20th century. The Fortes Museum Project will use the site's rich history as a unifying theme to organize the entire school curriculum. Fortes faculty, in conjunction with consultants from museums and local historians, will study the site's history and collaboratively develop instructional units that engage students in research that requires the development and use of knowledge and skills across subject areas. Working as co-learners, the results of teachers' and students' exploration will be used to create a museum at the school; a meaningful, authentic place for exhibiting and assessing student work and chronicling the community's history.
Magnet School
CSRD - The Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD)
program($75,000.00 over three years June 1999).
Virtual Professional development School.
Children's Crusade
Eisenhower Grant in partnership with Rhode Island College
Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities
Goff Teacher Grant from the Rhode Island Historical Society.
Rhode Island Foundation.
Healthy Schools! Healthy Kids! Emotional Competency Partnership.
Blueprints for Violence Prevention.
Advanced Technology for Teachers, Learning, and Schools (ATTLaS) Project, initiated by Brown University with support from the AT&&T Foundation.
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