Our Story
From Open Gym to Community school
Open Gym Roots
In 2015 Love City opened the Mackin building as a place for kids to come after school to shoot hoops and have a safe place to hang out in the afternoon. Over the years various different after school programs were added as volunteers came and went, everything from art club, to video game club. In 2018 responding to a need for more pre-schools in the neighborhood, Love City opened Laugh, Learn, Love Child Development center in the basement under the gym. This preschool served kids aged 1 – 5 preparing them for school.
The COVID Shift
When the pandemic hit, Love City was forced to close both the preschool and open gym in accordance with pandemic regulations. Kids once again took to the street, this time for most of the day, as many of them never logged on to NTI with the public schools. Once the local public school said they were going back virtually in the fall of 2020 we knew we had to do something, learning was not happening in our neighborhood.
The Mackin Building
In August 2020 we opened the Mackin building as a hub spot for students in the neighborhood to come with their public school issued laptops to log in and “do school” at our building. We had 60 kids coming 3 days a week to attend virtual school. With these 60 kids in the building we started doing some informal assessments and found the learning loss was profound, and NTI wasn’t helping any. We stopped the hub program in October to focus on opening our own school for the neighborhood and started Mighty Oak Academy in the Mackin building in January of 2021 for grades K – 7. The next year we added 8th grade and in 2024 we added 9th grade.