Company Profile

Overview EPIC High Schools enact a comprehensive school model that provides students a direct pathway to higher Using a competency-based, culturally responsive approach, EPIC High Schools support students as they and design the their futures. The leadership team includes core members of the Young Men’s Initiative highly selective school design fellowship resulting in the creation of three district high schools constituting the

EPIC Network. Key elements of the school model include:

Competency-based Instructional Model. EPIC’s competency-based approach allows students to progress based on mastery of skills, rather than time spent in class, meaning that no student is left behind and all are held to a rigorous standard that will prepare them for college and career. The principal focus is to help students develop and demonstrate competencies--clear actionable learning targets, such as the ability to read analytically- that demonstrate their academic, personal and professional readiness. Competencies are aligned to the Common Core and

assessed through students’ fulfillment of performance tasks-- rigorous, engaging and complex projects. Because learning pathways are accessible online, students move at their own pace, and receive support as needed. Teachers’ shared focus on a set of competencies mean that students have multiple opportunities to encounter and master core critical thinking, reading and writing skills across domains.

Integrated. EPIC High Schools recognize that, in order to support students to become agents of their life paths, we must broaden the concept of college and career readiness beyond building content knowledge and academic skills to a more integrated approach that supports students to become successful and balanced adults. Concretely, this shift involves articulating a holistic set of academic, social and emotional skills, creating applied learning experiences that integrate these skills and mirror the world of work, assessing social and emotional skills alongside academic skills, and hiring staff with youth development experience to work alongside teachers to support social

and emotional skill acquisition.

Culturally Responsive. Student engagement is a major factor in preventing student dropout. EPIC uses culturally responsive education practices to promote students’ sense of belonging, positive school culture and attendance. Culturally Responsive Education is the simple but powerful contention that achievement is anchored not just in building from one’s existing strengths but in full engagement of one’s self and lived experience. At EPIC, this includes incorporating student choice and voice in curriculum, examining personal identity through a weekly rites of passage program, and holding students accountable through restorative justice as

an alternative to zero-tolerance discipline.

education and the workforce.

skill up

iteration.

Human Centered. Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation. It involves a commitment to understanding individuals’ needs, recognizing that lived experience is legitimate and instructive, and building and revising solutions as needed to achieve increasingly better outcomes. Classroom learning revolves around the processes by which we seek to understand ambiguous problems and ideate solutions through empathy with the anticipated user, and this reflects the very design fellowship year EPIC’s school leaders spent building their schools together, with intent and