The History of Lindbergh Academy

The Lindbergh Academy is an on-campus alternative program for Lindbergh High School. Bess Wilfong, a teacher at Sperreng Middle School, was noticing a lot of her old students were dropping out when she went to the high school for different events. It made her wonder why, and if anything could be done. Bess Wilfong and Dr. Vic Lenz started a committee and came up with the idea of the Academy. Dr. Lenz was very interested in alternative learning. The Committee did a lot of research, had board meetings, and visited a lot of other schools that had programs such as Fernridge in the Parkway District, Positive in the Pattonville District and even went out to Colorado to look at a school there. The state then passed the Safe Schools Act, and part of that act provided grants to programs like the Academy in order to help at-risk students. The Board of Education then approved the program. Lindbergh received a grant for $125,000 and it was divided between the Academy and the Alternative to Suspension School. The Academy started in January of 1997 with two teachers, Bess Wilfong and Jim Petersen, and 25 students. It was hard for the two teachers to teach all the subjects that were going to be needed. The next school year the board approved for the Academy to hire 4 more teachers. Recently, the Academy has a new way of teaching with the 1-to-1 program in which each student gets to use a laptop for the course of the day. The program has been going very well. The goal of the Academy is to prevent kids that learn differently than others from dropping out. As an Academy student, I don’t know where I or a lot of other of my classmates would be without this wonderful program.