Accreditation

Joshua Academy is a private, Christian school. We are not a public charter or magnet school. We have met all of the requirements necessary to accept funds from family Educational Freedom Accounts (EFAs), as outlined in Arkansas Senate Bill 294 (LEARNS Act).

The State does not require non-public schools like ours to follow any type of state sanctioned curriculum (such as Common Core standards for Math and Language Arts).

While accreditation is not required for private schools to operate or for students to advance and graduate, an advantage is that accreditation provides parents with assurance that a school has met the rigorous standards set forth by an outside professional educational organization. It also means that the school is actively engaged in self-assessment and improvement to make sure they are achieving their mission.

We will seek accreditation from Christian Schools International (CSI) a nationally-recognized Christian school accrediting organization that is also recognized by the state of Arkansas through the Arkansas Non-public School Accrediting Association (ANSAA). Typically, the process takes about three years. We will keep our school community well-informed of our progress towards this goal.

A note about accreditation: There is a lot of confusion about accreditation. The only disadvantage to not being accredited is at the high school level when a student seeks to transfer high school credits from a non-accredited private school back to a public high school. In this case, the public high school can choose whether to accept the credits without an exam. The school may choose to require a competency exam for high school credit transfer to the public school. Colleges and universities do not require a private high school be accredited. Students graduating from home school have no disadvantage and neither do private school high school graduates. There is no disadvantage to the student at the elementary or middle school levels and grade progression has no association with accreditation status. We will be through our accreditation process long before our high school is built out.