Want the Traditional High School Experience Without the Tech? EVCA is Now Recruiting

EDGEWOOD – After 30 years of climbing the ranks of traditional public education, Joshua McCleave was almost ready to call it a career. Instead, two years ago, the veteran classroom teacher and administrator took up a new challenge at Estancia Valley Classical Academy, a tuition-free charter school now recruiting upper-grade students for available spaces in its back-to-basics model.

McCleave, the academy’s new interim executive director, spent three decades in the neighboring Moriarty-Edgewood School District doing nearly every job short of superintendent. He started as a fifth grade and computer teacher before moving into central office administration and high school leadership.

But as traditional public schools became bogged down by bureaucratic mandates, McCleave felt the core mission of education slipping away.

“I reached a point of some frustration as to where the traditional public schools were going, in that the focus on learning was so muddled with all the other components,” McCleave said. “Coming over here was a reenergizing of my career.”

Now entering his second year at the K-12 academy—having run its grammar school division last year—McCleave is pivoting the 525-student campus toward a challenging, distraction-free curriculum. That strategy includes a deliberate rejection of the one-to-one classroom technology craze that he argues is clouding short-term memory and stalling early brain development in young learners.

Instead of tablets, students use lockers to learn self-governance, pack their own lunches, and follow a uniform dress code.

The academy’s educational framework relies on the classical “trivium” method, separating development into three distinct phases: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. While the lower grades focus on the mechanics of reading and factual memorization, the upper grades—seven through 12—are immersed in rhetoric, training students to strip away raw emotion in favor of logic and factual reasoning.

“There’s emotion and there’s feeling in all things that we do—but to be able to reason first and have a true factual understanding of the world around us it was we are after,” McCleave said.

While the lower elementary classrooms are largely locked down at their charter-mandated cap of 54 students per grade level, the academy is using its current open enrollment lottery to fill open seats in the older brackets.

To draw those upper-grade students, McCleave is pushing back against the misconception that attending a charter school requires sacrificing a traditional high school experience. While the academy preserves its own K-12 arts curriculum and a competitive archery program, it lacks the massive budget required to field high-profile sports teams like football or basketball.

To bridge the gap, the school utilizes a cooperative agreement allowing its students to play competitive sports and enroll in Career Technical Education (CTE) programs back in the Moriarty-Edgewood district.

For McCleave, the long-term goal isn’t competing with the public system he left behind, but building a pipeline that forces students to take ownership of their own education and community through mandatory service-learning projects.

“I’d like to see us build relationships to where programs that we offer, we can work with the neighboring schools to be able to support their students’ learning, and vice versa,” McCleave said. “It isn’t a competition for kids, but it’s how can we overall support the community together.”

To learn more about Estancia Valley Classical Academy you can schedule an appoint for a tour of the school at (505) 431-3822, or visit the school’s website at https://theevca.com/