Our OST award for SY25 was slashed by nearly 78%, and we received less than a quarter of what we got last year, about $20K in all. We also had just a short window to complete our application for those funds, leaving us with some brutal choices in terms of which clubs to cut.
We decided to protect the programs and clubs that were most critical to our school culture, and/or were the most academically focused. Student Voice Committee, True Colors GSA, Lego Challenge, Academic Boost, et al. Yearbook will be a part of our Media and Tech program (our most popular club by far). Most of these programs serve students in the intermediate and middle school grades. So you will not see Games, Games, Games or Arts and Crafts as we have offered in the past.
But we were able to secure partnerships with 5 OST vendors to provide fee based programs here at Chappell; Band for Today, Goodseeds Yoga, iCook, Young Rembrandts, and Dance to Evolve. On Wednesday night the LSC approved all of our OST Service Provider agreements, and we are ready to share them with you!
Thankfully, we also had some angel donors fully fund our Choir and Rock Band, as well as a significant amount to put towards our Music House contract. We were able to partner with Math Circles of Chicago at a greatly reduced cost to the school, to provide a free OST course for high performing math students in the upper grades.
We wanted to share these tentative Fall days and locations ASAP, though our enrollment link will not be doing out until the end of September for Chappell run programs. Not all of these programs will have open enrollment, however, as some of the programs are criteria based. Academic Boost, Math Circles, and ESL Boost are rostered via invitation, for example, based on our iReady and Star360 testing. All of that guidance will be provided when we open up enrollment in a few weeks.
A second session in Spring (actually late February to April) will also be offered next semester. We are hopeful that additional funds will be allocated for our Spring session, based on our program attendance in the Fall.
Click here to sign up for one of our free Fall programs
For fee based programs, click on the vendor logos below for a sign up link or informational flyer!
Band