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Getting to Know iLead
For more than a decade, iLEAD Schools' tuition-free, public charter schools have designed and implemented a transformational education model focused on high-quality project-based and social-emotional learning. iLEAD - which stands for international, SCVi, iLEAD's founding school, opened in Santa Clarita in 2008 with 100+ learners in grades Kinder through seventh. Today, it has grown to over 900 learners in grades TK to twelfth and has graduated six classes. Offering site-based, hybrid and home-study options, SCVi features an award-winning theatre and film production program as well as International Baccalaureate, aerospace and K-to-second dual-language immersion programs.
On the east side of the Santa Clarita Valley, iLEAD Agua Dulce is now in its third year and home to 250+ TK-to-eighth graders. With its small class sizes, hands-on technology and inspiring outdoor classrooms, the school promotes individualized, play-based, STEAM-focused and real-world educational opportunities. The teachers (facilitators) and success coaches are devoted to providing learners with inspiring opportunities for project-based and social-emotional learning.
iLEAD Exploration Hybrid provides homeschool families with a credentialed teacher (facilitator) who assigns and creates a customized, individualized learning plan each year based on grade-level standards and the learner's passions. Instructional funds are used to support and enhance each learner's education. iLEAD Exploration values community by providing enrichment opportunities through a variety of field studies, service projects, park days and family gatherings.
At iLEAD Schools, they are passionate about project-based learning because it goes to the very heart of how students learn. They want learners to think for themselves. The goal is nothing short of learning - to change the world.
ileadschools.org

The Great Books & a Classical Education
by Wally Caddow
At a Classical school, students actively engage with the ideas of the past and present - not just reading about them, but evaluating them, tracing their development and comparing them to other philosophies and opinions. There's a very practical way to engage in this conversation of ideas: Read, talk about and write about the Great Books.
This Classical goal is a greater understanding of our own civilization, country and place in time, stemming from an understanding of what has come before us. The student who has read Aristotle and Plato on human freedom, Thomas Jefferson on liberty, Frederick Douglass on slavery and Martin Luther King on civil rights will read Toni Morrison's "Beloved" with an understanding denied to the student who comes to the book without any knowledge of its roots.
We must seek what is most worthy in the works of both the past and the present. Henry David Thoreau might have said it best, when he remarked, "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."
Wally Caddow is the managing director of
Trinity Classical Academy. 296-2601