Allison Academy School is a private, non-denominational, co-ed private Middle and High School (grades 6-12) in North Miami Beach, Florida, United States. It is located 5 miles north of downtown Miami.
Dr. Sarah Allison founded Allison Academy as an independent private school in 1983. The school evolved from the Reading, Math, and Learning Center started by Dr. Allison in 1970, to meet student needs and parental demands for a full-time program offering an intensive developmental and enrichment curriculum.
STEM disciplines guarantee wide range success for high school students
STEM is an acronym referring to the academic disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
STEM education, then, is the acquiring of knowledge in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics through an integrated approach: one that offers a hands-on and relevant learning and teaching experience for children of all ages. This includes young children from birth all the way to adolescents.
Focus on natural sciences and technology
With regard to education, the introduction and teaching of STEM education has garnered fervent support from various institutions and prominent voices in the fields of both education and science.
According to a great number of educational scientists, STEM skills should be studied early and not be explored independently or in isolation as a separate group of subjects but rather implemented across the board, in all schools, regardless of the dominant educational profile students have opted for.
One of the main differences that truly sets STEM schools apart is the fact that they have fully integrated both natural sciences and liberal arts into their educational programs.
Partnership with NASA and the Kennedy Space Center
For over a decade, Allison Academy students have had the opportunity to engage in the Fairchild Challenge – an award-winning interdisciplinary environmental science competition designed to stimulate intellectual curiosity and foster environmental stewardship for a more sustainable future.
In partnership with NASA and the Kennedy Space Center, Fairchild Tropical Garden has offered Allison Academy students, as well as students across the nation, opportunities to collect botanical data that contributes directly to NASA’s effort to find suitable crops for long-term space missions.
Using an in-class laboratory similar to the one being used on the International Space Station, our students are conducting ongoing research on various factors contributing to plant growth in space, and have received an award for the quality and clarity of their data.
This STEM-based project has given Allison Academy students the opportunity to contribute authentic data to the scientific community, to help with solving problems, and has put them in direct contact with NASA scientists and college professors, and continues to empower them to become, as Fairchild’s education staff puts it, “the next generation of scientists, researchers, educated voters, policymakers, and environmentally-minded citizens.”
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