The Number One Determiner of Student Success

Education is a difficult topic for many families – fitting in extracurriculars, attendance, balancing academics and social life. It’s a challenge many of us face when seeking what’s right for our individual family needs. With the emergence of online curriculums, charter schools, private schools, and more intricate home-school curriculums, there are a lot of unexplored options for your family’s needs.

To help explore some of our alternatives, we interviewed a local organization, the Stronghold Institute, to provide insight into new programs coming to our community.

Stronghold Institute was started by two public school educators who learned the secret to student success. They observed what worked and what didn’t in preparing them for productivelives outside of school. Then and now, they grew their passion for creating meaningful curriculums that would better serve the communities they are in.

During the interview, Stronghold Institute Director Paul White said, “We observed and worked with countless classrooms of children in many school districts over several decades. The ‘must-have’ subject that prepares kids for successful, productive lives, is completely ignored by most education programs.”

Here is the Stronghold philosophy, according to this interview:

The key to students having successful careers and productive lives is NOT academic knowledge acquisition. Learning the skills necessary for any occupation is important; but in today’s world, everything mankind has ever learned can be accessed on the internet, or even from an iPhone.

Student success is not connected with where (or how) you go to school. There are students in public school, private school, and homeschool who find success and happiness. And there are students in all three settings who do NOT.

Here’s the most important fact to know about helping your child be successful:

• Children succeed in direct proportion to how effectively they’re taught to have consistent character, strong moral values, and understand how these qualities underlie every aspect of their lives.

This type of education is what Stronghold Institute offers to children of all ages:

Our Character/Values Education classes are offered in a six-class/three-week package, with two classes per week. Each class is 90 minutes long, with flexible class times, and fees on a sliding scale.

All classes are presented at Stronghold Institute’s first-class facility: 9480 Gateway Drive - Suite 100 - in Reno.

Topics covered in class include the following:

1. Character, integrity, moral values, and moral courage: What are they and why do they matter?
2. Taking a “Personal Integrity and Moral Courage Inventory.”
3. Are everyone’s moral values the same?
4. Determining your own moral values.
5. Integrity, moral values, and the law.
6. How character and moral values make school, choosing careers, and part-time jobs much different…and better.
7. How character and moral values make you function better as your unique self, and also as a contributing part of your family team.
8. How character and moral values improve your decision-making
9. Character, values, and clean/sober living
10. Build better relationships of all kinds with character and moral values
11. Resisting peer pressure
12. Character and values to improve personal fitness? Yes!
13. Tired of lying about everything? It’s all about character and moral values.
14. Character and moral values - the rights and responsibilities of US citizenship and obeying the law.

Contact Stronghold Director Paul White for more information: (775) 685.8200.