East Wake Leadership Academy provides students with the help they need to develop their academic skills while growing socially and emotionally. As important, we provide parents with a safe place for students to go after school.

What services do you offer? Our After-School Program at the East Wake Leadership Academy is tailored to assist kindergarten through eighth grade students with homework help and much more. Students get skill-building in core subjects that include language arts, math, science, and social studies. They get help completing school projects to ensure they understand the concepts taught, and to ensure they are completed on schedule.

Do you have a disciplinary system? Instead of a disciplinary system, we use a leadership system. Our leadership program equips students to be everyday leaders with the tools to manage their behavior and implementation consistently good decision making. They engage in an honors-based program designed to help them practice respect, kindness and helpfulness to leaders and peers.

Students are rewarded for demonstrating good decisions, good attitudes,and helpfulness along with completing assignments, . On their individual balance sheets, they receive Leadership Academy Bucks for those behaviors. Withdrawals are made for undesirable behaviors. At the end of the school term deposits are tallied; students receive rewards. The Deposit/Withdrawal system is designed to remind students of their commitment to always being their best.

This system is used in the place of a disciplinary system that typically recognizes undesirable behavior while ignoring desirable behavior. The goal is to remind students of the personal goals they have for their own conduct. 

One classroom leader remarked,

“In the years we have been using the deposit-withdrawal system, we have not had to suspend a single student. Neither can I recall a single student who was not favorably responsive to it. What we notice is that the students are very proud when they are publicly commended for their good attitudes, good behavior, and good choices. Students want to do well, and this system is a way of reminding them that they want to do well.”

At the end of the school day, how do students get to the East Wake Leadership Academy? We provide transportation to the 

EWLA. Parents pick up their children at the end of our program.

Students are picked up from their respective elementary or middle schools each Monday,  Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and brought to the East Wake Leaderhip Academy. Arriving, they receive a healthy snack, get a few minutes to chat with each other, then get to work completing homework. As needed, they go on to receive help in core subject areas.

Paid staff and volunteers work together to give students one-on-one help. When they have extra time, they get an opportunity to play board games.

We appeal to research, report cards, and reports from teachers and parents to answer that question. Programs at the East Wake Leadership Academy are research-based, drawing from the Teaching Methodologies of the late Marva Collins and research by Dr. Delores M. Richardson, who designed the program. That research suggests that students who receive academic support year-round experience considerable academic gains. Further, when students participate in the year-round programs for multiple years, the progress they make is compounded.

"I cannot tell you how many teachers who have some of the students in our program have stopped me at school to comment on how much progress some of our students have made. They thank me for what we are doing."

Rev. Colette Parker, Former EWLA Director