Original Research by School Decision on Reaching All Minds Academy
Reaching All Minds Academy is a small charter school district serving about elementary and middle grades across nine grade levels, kindergarten through eighth. The student body is overwhelmingly Hispanic, with a substantial population of Black students and a very small representation of other racial and ethnic groups. The school does not report the share of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, and state testing proficiency data were not available, so academic performance cannot be assessed against state benchmarks.
What is clear from the available information is that the school has invested significantly in an agricultural and sustainability-focused STEM program. Over recent years, the academy expanded what started as a STEM course into a full AgriScience curriculum and department. That shift includes hands-on infrastructure: a Mobile Greenhouse built from a repurposed school bus, a network of community gardens on campus, and student-designed building projects like a hoop house that opened in spring. The school runs a Student Ambassador program connected to this work. This is not a typical elementary and middle school STEM track; it is built around project-based learning in agriculture and environmental sustainability, and it shapes the day-to-day academic experience.
The school has positioned this program to address local food access. Publicly reported, the Mobile Greenhouse serves East Durham, a USDA-designated food desert, and teaches community members about home gardening. For families, this means their children are learning science and math through real work on real problems in their own neighborhood, not simulations.
On attendance, the school sits below the midpoint among Durham County's districts on chronic absenteeism, a mild bright spot compared to peers. Per-pupil spending falls in the middle to upper-middle range for the county, so the school is investing moderately by local standards.
The school's smaller enrollment and grade band mean it does not serve high school, so there is no graduation rate to measure. State proficiency data for the grades the school does serve were not made available, so a parent cannot currently see how students are performing on standard assessments in reading and math. That is a genuine gap if test results matter to your decision; you may want to contact the school directly to ask about academic outcomes and how the AgriScience emphasis complements core instruction. The choice here rests partly on whether the curriculum's project-based, place-based model aligns with how your family approaches learning, and partly on whether you can build confidence in core academics through conversation with the school itself.
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