Charter school eyes Coweta for new location | News

Kirby and Janet Tomko, enrollment and government affairs director for LCS, spoke at the Kiwanis Club of Newnan on Tuesday, March 19, about how the charter school operates and its philosophy for its students.

Currently, LCS has two locations: Atlanta Classical Academy in Buckhead and Northwest Classical Academy in Kennesaw.

According to Kirby, he founded Atlanta Classical Academy, the first of LCS’ charter schools, because he was struggling to find a public or private school that would put high-quality literature in his children’s hands.

If Liberty Classical Schools establishes a charter school in the area, it will serve students in Coweta and Fayette, as well as neighboring counties, such as Spalding, Heard and Fulton.

Kirby said the potential charter school’s curriculum draws from Hillsdale College’s controversial 1776 curriculum, which consists of Hillsdale College-vetted books, online courses and resource recommendations.

Hillsdale College’s website states that the 1776 curriculum “provides teachers with guidance — not dictates — about how to plan and teach a given topic in American history or civics.”

“We don’t use the 1776 curriculum per se,” Kirby said in an interview after the Kiwanis Club meeting. “We use their program guide, which is an outline of American history that we draw from. We pull from primary source documents, so our curriculum is grounded in Hillsdale’s curriculum, but it’s fabulous,…