With Tax-Free Weekend over and classes resuming for most children in just over week, school is already a hot-button topic. But superstar athlete LeBron James made the topic viral recently with his latest accomplishment—opening the I Promise School via his LeBron James Family Foundation charity in his native city of Akron, OH. Starting with third and fourth graders and evolving to include grades 1-8 in the next few years, the public school campus is designed to provide support for both students and parents, highlighting the integral need for campuses and communities across the nation to work together for the best educational outcome.

Charter schools and arguments for or against them have also created controversy in North Texas, but the founder of the Dallas-based Evolution Academy, long-time educator Cynthia Trigg, welcomes the renewed focus on learning opportunities that value emotional growth as well as academics or students that feel overlooked and left behind by more conventional institutions of learning.

In a recent phone interview, Trigg discussed the significance of James’ achievement, the unique attributes that Evolution Academy offers and the ways they measure achievement beyond ‘teaching to the test.’

LeBron James’ I Promise School is definitely bringing more attention to the many needs that a diverse population has as far as educating the youth. How much of an advantage is that for Evolution Academy?

“We are so excited to have Lebron using his role as an athlete and an activist to speak out on how each student learns differently. Life’s circumstances affect students as well they do adults. Evolution Academy focuses on students with critical needs to get them back into the educational setting, feedback in a caring environment and educators willing to wrap their arms around them as they learn.”

There’s been a recent uproar about the impact of charter schools on already-existing public schools. Do you believe people are fully aware of what the option entails?

” I think there is a grassroots need to educate. Charter schools are public schools that have been granted a specific autonomy in regards to curriculum and instruction that a typical school district would not have. The purpose of charter schools was to allow educators to think outside of the box to address educational reform. This is our 17th year in operations [at Evolution Academy], and there isn’t a week that goes by where I won’t encounter someone asking me, ‘What is a charter school’? We still have some work to do with educating the public as far as explaining the different missions and specializations that charter schools provide. At Evolution Academy, we focus on drop-out recovery, a niche as far as the type of students that we internationally reach out to serve.”

Your Richardson campus was joined by campuses in both Beaumont and Houston in 2013 and have graduated nearly 3,000 students to universities, the military and the workforce. What makes Evolution Academy so successful?

“We are now moving from a ‘meet all and pass all’ to a growth measure, which states to teachers, ‘the student may or may not have met the mark as far as the testing, but in the time when they were in your care, did they grow?’It’s not solely focused only on that student mastering a particular assessment, it’s also about whether they’re college and career ready. We conduct interest inventories and work with students in helping them to identify their career choices and vocational certifications. Our campuses also have articulation agreements with several community colleges to create courses that are in sync with graduation along with the state requirements of accountability.”

Evolution Academy has campuses in Richardson, Beaumont and Houston, Texas and has open enrollment year-round on all three campuses. Students can enroll online at evolutionacademy.org or visit one of the campuses to enroll in person.