Woodland Community Academy adds middle school facility to campus

Woodland Community Academy’s school year didn’t start off as planned. 

The school spent the first three weeks sending middle school students on field trips rather than in the classroom because the school’s new middle school building wasn’t complete. 

“We just took the kids everywhere,” said Jennifer Passmore, the director of Woodland Community Academy. “We’ve had to be flexible this year. Starting out not in our building made things a huge challenge, but as we’ve started, we’ve seen this isn’t working or this does work.” 

Now the middle school students and staff are in a groove in the new 13,500-square-foot building that houses the middle school. 

Woodland Community Academy serves infants through seventh grade with a plan to expand to eighth grade next school year. 

“It’s awesome,” Passmore said. “It was well worth the wait. The classrooms are designed specifically for the needs of middle school kids. It makes a huge difference for them.”

Woodland Community Church planned to break ground in spring 2020, but the pandemic hit causing the groundbreaking to be postponed. The church was able to break ground on the $4.6 million expansion in September 2020. 

“It was a long process because we had all the civil work we had to do first before we started the actual construction of the building,” said Dewayne McFarlin, the executive pastor at Woodland Community Church.

Passmore and McFarlin said there are no plans to add a high school to the campus.

Passmore said the classrooms are rectangular in shape rather than square because “that pulls the teacher closer to the students.”

The classrooms feature tables at different heights that allow all students to be able to see the teacher at the front of the classroom without being blocked by other students. 

“Attention is in the eyes,” Passmore said. “Wherever your eyes are, that’s where you focus and attention is.”

The tables also allow for students to work collaboratively. The tables are on wheels so they can be easily moved into groups.

Passmore said Woodland Community Academy’s approach to middle school differs from other schools in the area. 

“We have a strong public education in Manatee County but even with the best schools, middle school is tough and one of the things we wanted to do was approach it much differently,” Passmore said. 

Besides academics, a priority for the middle school is to address students’ social and spiritual needs. 

“It’s the question that middle school kids are asking, ‘Who am I?’” Passmore said. “Being able to start from the ground up a school that would go after those needs, it’s going to be interesting to see how it affects the students academically. We’ve already seen a lot of academic progress. Kids work hard. We have few discipline issues. We feel like a lot of that is related to the spiritual and social need and making sure those things are met.”

To address those needs, Passmore said the middle school provides 30 minutes per day to have advisory meetings in which students learn about emotional intelligence, their spiritual being and aspects of social learning. 

The school also provides a 20-minute break in the middle of the morning to give students an opportunity to socialize. 

Besides the middle school building, the church also built a park behind the middle school as well as a small park at the front of the school. The park behind the middle school, which is open to the public, has a disc golf course, exercise equipment, a walking trail and more. 

The church also is expanding the Woodland Fine Arts Academy, which is a ministry that provides dance, music and other fine arts lessons.

New classes that will be included in the Woodland Fine Arts Academy are digital art, photography, film, editing, sound and lighting and edible art. Edible arts is baking cookies, cake decorating and other aspects of baking and cooking.

“They’re more technology based art forms,” Passmore said. “We’re finding kids have a lot more interest in that. Over the pandemic, students were spending more time with their computer. They have developed more of an interest in those digital art forms. We will have students that go in and create images completely on the computer and then use electronic music to enhance those features.”