Success Flourishes through Community Support
Lemon Bay High School is unique in the consistent and generous support it receives from the greater Englewood Community. Specifically, the many private, corporate and personal donations LBHS community members extend in services, dollars, and volunteer hours that directly benefit our students and staff in our school’s commitment to excellence.
No greater example of community partnership-power can be found than that of the Lemon Bay Community Academic Partners (LBCAP). A 501c3 academic booster organization with the goal of improving academic achievement for all students attending Lemon Bay. Now in its third year, LBCAP raised and expended $25,000 last school-year to advance greater learning success for Manta Ray students. Foundationally, these funds ($3000) provided an organization planner handbook to each of Lemon Bays’s 1100 students, grades nine through 12, in the most recent school year, and the funding continued to the 1060 student who arrived for the 2019-2020 school year.
Students also derived benefit from Lemon Bay’s unique and highly successful after-school tutoring program which operates Mondays through Thursdays throughout the school year. Here, students can get the extra help, guidance, content-and-skill explanations in assignments and in preparation for upcoming classroom-based assessments. LBCAP funds provided over $12,000 for teachers to staff these after-school help sessions in 2018-2019 for Lemon Bay students.
A smaller, but just as effective in its concentration-tutoring initiative also advances student preparation for Advanced Placement (AP) Tests and State Assessments (EOC/FSA), largely taken in May of each academic year. LBCAP funds ($1600) last year allowed students to meet with their (subject-area) teaches for prep (“cram sessions”) for their upcoming tests through intense (Saturday) lab sessions.
No less noteworthy are LBCAP funds ($4000) that supplied enrichment software, specifically in mastery of grammar and usage in writing and in improvement of vocabulary use, in our English Language Arts classes. The LBCAP also spent $5000 on a school-wide Literacy Initiative. The school is proud of its teachers’ commitment to encouraging students to write across-subject-areas in response to informational, content-area reading through expository/argumentative compositions.
No greater evidence of the power of LBCAP can be found than in support-and-effect relationship the initiative has helping the school earn consecutive grades of A in the 2017-2018 school year and (again) in the 2018-2019 school year. These A grades in the Florida School Grades program overlap LBCAP’s incredible support of student-excellence efforts. LBCAP donors can be justifiably proud of the effect that their generosity is having on student achievement efforts at our high school.
Donors’ contributions for LBCAP fall into four categories: $250-$499=Honor Sponsor; $500-$999=Cum Laude Sponsor; $1000-$1499=Magna Cum Laude Sponsor; and $1500 and over=Summa Cum Laude Sponsor.
As Lemon Bay’s principal and on behalf of our 51 teachers and our 1060 students, I thank the efforts of each and every LBCAP volunteer and donor. Your efforts and the widespread support Lemon Bay enjoys from the greater Englewood Community is exceptional. We are fortunate to benefit from this unique school-community partnership. Our students, our teachers, their combined success, and our school grades all shine in the spirit of support our community provides.