At Lake County Schools, the individuality of students is embraced and celebrated. For over 10 years, the school district has developed a personalized learning program designed to put students in control of how they learn.
Lake County Schools received its first grant to develop personalized learning in 2005. Support for the program has grown, recently receiving a $2.5 million grant. Two main goals are kept in mind when utilizing grant money to develop programs:
- provide technology tools for students and teachers, and
- provide professional development for teachers to ensure these technologies are used in the most innovative way.
The district fully launched personalized learning at five schools, and plans to fully implement personalized learning in all schools by 2022.
Students are thriving outside the classroom as well, with various student organizations earning national recognition for advanced STEM projects and outstanding community service. For example, R2DTools, a robotics team from Cypress Ridge Elementary, competed in the VEX World Challenge 2016. The worldwide robotics competition hosted 145 teams from 31 different nations. The Lake County students were ranked 33rd in the world and 3rd in the state of Florida for elementary computer programming. After winning several awards at the state competition, the students presented their STEM project to a global audience at the VEX World Challenge.
The Mount Dora High School’s Air Force JROTC unit earned a Silver Star Community Service with Excellence Award for the second year in a row. The award recognizes AFJROTC units for performing outstanding service to the school and community, and the Mount Dora unit generated about 5,000 community service hours for the 2015-2016 academic school year. As the highest level unit award an AFJROTC unit can win, the Silver Star award is granted only to the top five percent of all 892 units worldwide.