FAQ

River Oaks Charter School (ROA) is a personalized learning, public charter school. We personalize the learning to each student. We are also a public school, which means that we follow the state standards and administer the state mandated assessments.

We are truly a community of caring teachers, staff and families. We all have one thing in mind: To make sure that your student is successful. Our staff works extremely hard to support you and to be your partner in education. We work together as a team, so we can support you along the way and on this journey. If you join our program, you will be working with a team of experts. All of our teachers are fully California credentialed. They are beyond passionate about what they do and many of our teachers not only home-schooled their own students, but many of them have been at River Oaks since the program’s inception in 2010. It is our goal and our mission to support you and create a community for you.

There is no cost to attend ROA. We are state funded just like any other public school.

ROA has two accreditations: WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) and the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) accreditation. These accreditations show that ROA has an academically rigorous program. Our high school diplomas are welcomed by all colleges throughout the country. These accreditations further attest to the fact that ROA prepares all high school students for college and career and gives our program credibility and standing within the higher academic institutions.

Our main facility is located in beautiful Westlake Village. We are off Hampshire Road off the 101 freeway.  In Oxnard, we are excited to move into a brand-new facility that is off Gonzalez Road between Rice and Rose, off the 101 freeway. Both sites offer academic support and are open 5 days/week, so we can offer academic support and answer your questions.

We have a myriad of different curricula. We offer the traditional large publishers (Glencoe, McGraw Hill, etc.), but also use a lot of more homeschool-friendly materials. We will work with our families to help select the materials that best suit the student’s learning style and the parents teaching style. We can also create a “blend”, consisting of some books and materials and adding online classes for your student. Since we are a public school, ROA provides your student with all of his/her materials and classes needed for his/her academics free of charge.

We are a TK-12^th grade program. A student qualifies for the TK program, if his/her 5^th birthday falls between September 2 and December 1.

The parent plays an important role at ROA. The parent in our program is the academic facilitator. That means that ROA relies on the parent to be our “eyes” at home. We ask our parents to make sure that they check on their student’s progress daily, review the work and make sure that the student does the assigned work at home. We also ask the parent that they grade/review the work and attend the regularly scheduled meetings with the Coaching Teacher and the student, so we can work together in partnership to make your student successful.

Our teachers are here to partner with you and guide and support you along your journey to educate your child. You will have an assigned teacher and meet with him/her regularly. We do have to meet at least every 20 school days, but we often suggest meeting much more frequently, so we can make sure that we answer all your questions, guide and support you and that we keep you and the student “on track”. The teacher will not write your lesson plans, but help you with the assignments and help you with the pacing plan to make sure that learning happens. The student dictates the pace of the learning and that can vary between all subjects. That is why we work so closely with our families to make sure that the student is challenged but not frustrated with the assignments and will make appropriate academic progress. We like to incorporate your student’s passions into the learning and will work closely with you to do so. We are always open and encourage you to ask questions. Not only will you get one teacher assigned to you, but you ultimately have an entire team behind you, who is working hard to assist and support you on your journey.

We do not give letter grades to our students in K-7th grades. We are giving letter grades from grade 8th-12^th grade. Since you are working closely with your student you will always know, if he/she understand the materials. While you can give chapter and unit assessments, they only guide our instruction and will help us if we need to adjust our curriculum or our instruction. We believe that learning is a process and therefore will always give our students the opportunity to review and relearn something rather than just holding firm with a grade on an assessment. The parent, teacher and student work together.

Our students also take our local assessment three times/year (at the beginning of the school year, in November and in the spring, so we can make sure that the student is academically progressing.

We administer all state mandated assessments and ask that all of our students participate in those since our funding is tied to having at least 95% of our students partake in these exams. We also administer the PE exam to our students in 5/7/9^th grades.

ROA does not give out funding. Our model is a different one. We pride ourselves in the fact that we not only offer our workshops and classes on campus, but also that we have a close relationship with you and support you not just academically, but take the whole child into consideration. We also feel strongly to offer a community at our sites, and with our staff, students and parents. We don’t want you to have to go out and figure out vendors and choose from a “park and rec” like offering where you drive your student all over town for workshops and classes. Therefore, our model offers everything on campus (and for the fall 2020 also virtually due to Covid). We continue to offer our academic support at our sites as best as possible. If you go on our website you can see our workshop schedule (pre-Covid) and our current virtual offerings. For the fall 2020 we believe that we are going to offer a hybrid model, where we will have some classes on campus, some at the park, and some online. This will depend heavily on the orders of the Ventura County Health Department and the overall guidelines that are available at that time. We hope to know more by the beginning of August.

Students in K-8 are expected to work in 5 areas on a daily basis: Math, Social Studies, Science, English Language Arts and PE. Depending on grade level they are expected to work about 20-25 minutes in K-2 and about 35-45 minutes in grades 3-5 and 45-50 minutes in grades 6-8. Students in high school are expected to take about 25-35 credits (5-7 classes) and work about 50 minutes/class/day. We have a virtual high school tour on our website that you can view to understand high school a bit better. We also have an amazing high school guidance counselor who can help you and answer your high school questions. Our high school program offers many paths to graduation, including concurrent enrollment at the local community colleges, classes in different career pathways and creating electives to incorporate our students’ passions. It is very exciting to be a high school student at ROA.

We are passion powered. We want to hear what your student is interested in and passionate about. We love to try to build that into the daily academic work, so we can enhance the students’ learning and interests. That can be in form of adding or substituting reading materials or creating courses in high school.

ROA has a full SPED team. We have resource teachers, speech, OT and counseling services. We also have school psychologists and work closely with the VC SELPA for guidance and support. We review all IEPs annually and schedule assessments when requested and indicated. We also have students who have 504 Plans which we review and service annually.

Pre-Covid we offered 2 days of workshops for K-5^th/6^th and 2 days of workshops for 6^th -12^th at both sites. You can find a pre-Covid workshop schedule on our website at: www.riveroakscharter.com/workshop-signup. We also had daily labs and focus rooms (study halls) which were staffed by teachers and specialists to support our students. While there are sign-ups for the workshops, there were no sign-ups required for academic support in the focus rooms and labs. For the fall 2020, we are planning on having a hybrid model, where we offer some onsite classes and workshops for those who are comfortable attending them, some virtual classes, as well as onsite academic support. We hope to offer some classes also at the park (both at Oxnard and Westlake). But, of course, that will all depend on what the situation will be in August.

ROA has an extensive catalog with A-G (UC approved) classes that our high school students can choose from to make sure that they are prepared to apply to a UC (or 4 year) university. We also offer for our students to take AP classes and are authorized to administer the AP exams at our site. We administer the PSAT and SATs (free of charge to our students) multiple times/year also at our facility. Furthermore, we offer free SAT prep in ELA and math.