The Hart School District governing board renewed the Albert Einstein Academy’s accreditation for another five years in a 5-0 vote Wednesday before a large group of AEA families anxiously awaiting the decision.  After starting with more than 200 students in August 2010, the school has grown to have a large waiting list and boasts high Academic Performance Index scores.

“They are so accomplished,” Hart board member Paul Strickland said. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful school.”

Strickland said the reasons for renewing the accreditation were primarily academic.  In addition to highlighting the foreign languages including Mandarin Chinese and Aramaic offered by the AEA, Strickland noted that the school’s API score of 908, college preparatory curriculum, and high proficiency scores made it worthy of renewal.

Currently offering grades 7-9, AEA has plans to add a grade each year until all high school grades are offered and is working on beginning an elementary school program.

Rabbi Mark Blazer, who submitted the initial proposal for the high school to the Hart district, said that AEA is planning to offer an elementary school program in the fall of 2012 despite having been turned down by the Saugus and Newhall Elementary School Districts.  “We already started the process with the Los Angeles County Office of Education.  We’ve gone down that road so that if they don’t want to work with us, our option is to go to the LA County Office of Education.”

“I think that if they offer something the elementary schools don’t have, than we should give them a chance,” board member Joe Messina said, when asked what he thought of AEA’s difficulty receiving accreditation from Santa Clarita elementary school districts.