Our Story

In March 2020 when the world shut down, the open gym program held at Love City’s Mackin gym also closed along with the Love City preschool operating in the basement of the gym. As the summer progressed Love City through their relationships with kids in the community learned that online learning was not something that was accessible for our neighborhood, whether it was connectivity issues or adult supervision challenges, kids in the neighborhood were not logging on to do school. When the local public school system, JCPS, announced in the fall of 2020 that it would not be going back to school in person that fall, we knew we had to do something. We opened the Mackin building, spread everyone out and had 60 kids coming 3 days a week with their school issued laptops using the internet at the building to log on and “do school.” We very quickly became not just a place for them to come and log on, but the place and people they looked at as their school. Some informal testing of those 60, who all lived within 1 mile of the building but attended 19 different schools throughout the county, showed us just how much the achievement gap was affecting our neighborhood. We had 8th graders that were reading on a 2nd grade level, 3rd graders that couldn’t read at all, and kindergarteners expected to navigate complex PowerPoint lessons to learn their ABCs. We knew something had to change, and Mighty Oak Academy was born. We opened our doors as a private community academy on January 4, 2021 with 27 students. Over the years we have grown to a Kindergarten – 5th grade school.