Mobile County’s only charter school is set to grow. The Alabama Public Charter School Commission has approved an expansion plan that will let ACCEL Day and Evening Academy begin enrolling middle school students, adding grades 6 through 8 to a campus that has so far served only high schoolers. The decision pushes the school’s reach several years down the age ladder and, in the view of its supporters, positions it to catch struggling students before the hardest problems take hold.
ACCEL opened in 2017 inside the former ITT Technical Institute building on Cottage Hill Road, becoming the state’s first public charter school. The building itself carried a certain symbolism — a trade-school campus that had served career-focused students reopened as a school built around students the traditional system was struggling to hold onto. Since then ACCEL has focused exclusively on grades 9 through 12, building a program around roughly 300 students who officials describe as being at risk of falling behind or dropping out.
The newly approved expansion will let the school reach students years earlier, before many of the challenges that charter organizers say derail teenagers ever take hold. Research on dropout prevention consistently points to the middle school years as the period when attendance problems, course failures and disengagement first appear — years before a student actually leaves school. By enrolling students in grade 6, ACCEL aims to work with them through those warning years with its full toolkit already in place.
How the Expansion Works
Under the plan approved this week, ACCEL expects to bring in up to 100 middle schoolers by the 2020-2021 school year, with that number growing to as many as 165 the year after. The phased approach gives the school time to hire teachers trained for early adolescence, reconfigure space on the Cottage Hill Road campus and build the counseling structures that a younger population requires. Middle schoolers have different developmental needs than high school students, and a school that has only ever served teenagers will be adapting its schedule, discipline model and family engagement approach accordingly.
School leaders say the addition will not change the model that has defined ACCEL since its founding: small class sizes, flexible scheduling, and instruction built around each student’s individual needs rather than a single fixed pace for the whole classroom. As a public charter school, ACCEL operates under a performance contract with the state commission rather than directly under the Mobile County Public School System, giving it flexibility over calendar, staffing and curriculum in exchange for accountability on results. Enrollment is tuition-free and open to students across the county.
Roots in the Mobile Area Education Foundation
ACCEL grew out of an effort by the Mobile Area Education Foundation, and the school was co-founded by MAEF’s chief executive officer, Carolyn R. Akers. The foundation had spent years working on public education issues in Mobile County — the state’s largest school system — building programs around college and career readiness and pushing for new options for students the system was losing. The charter school became the organization’s most concrete answer to that problem.
In a statement following the commission’s vote, Akers said the middle school addition reflects years of work by the school’s board, faculty and staff to widen access to a style of teaching she believes better serves struggling students. She said the goal has always been to prepare young people for what comes after graduation, whether that is college, technical training or a job that can support a family, and that reaching students in middle school will let the school step in before problems compound.
Academically at-risk students remain the core focus of ACCEL’s mission, and supporters of the expansion argue that intervening during the middle school years, when many students first begin to disengage from traditional classroom settings, gives counselors and teachers a better chance of keeping them on track toward graduation. The school’s emphasis on social and emotional support alongside academics is expected to carry over directly into the middle school program. For students carrying burdens well beyond the classroom — unstable housing, family responsibilities, repeated school moves — the combination of small classes and flexible pacing is designed to remove the obstacles that a traditional schedule can turn into reasons to quit.
Part of a Statewide Pattern
ACCEL was not the only charter school action to come out of the commission’s meeting. Commissioners also signed off on the creation of a new Capstone Charter School in Tuscaloosa and approved an expansion of University Charter School in Livingston, part of a broader pattern of growth for Alabama’s still-young charter school system.
Charter schools arrived in Alabama only after the Legislature passed the state’s charter law in 2015, making it one of the last states in the nation to authorize them. The Alabama Public Charter School Commission, the state’s authorizing body, approves new schools, monitors their academic and financial performance, and holds them to the terms of their contracts. For years after the law passed, Mobile County — with more than 50,000 public school students — was the logical proving ground for the model, and ACCEL’s launch there made it the test case the rest of the state watched.
What Middle School Expansion Means for Families
No firm date has been set for when middle school applications will open, but families interested in the program are expected to hear more details from ACCEL and the Mobile Area Education Foundation as the school finalizes staffing and space at its Cottage Hill Road campus ahead of the first middle school class. Because charter schools are public schools, admission is by application and, if applications exceed available seats, by an open lottery — no tuition, no entrance exam and no selective screening of applicants.
For Mobile families weighing options, the expansion adds a choice that did not previously exist in the county: a public middle school built specifically for students who are struggling to stay on track. Parents of a sixth grader who is already missing school or falling behind in reading and math have traditionally had to wait for high school — and often for a crisis — before alternatives like ACCEL became available. The expansion moves that entry point up by three years.
The Cottage Hill Road campus also sits within reach of some of Mobile’s neighborhoods where academic need is deepest, along a commercial corridor served by city bus routes. Transportation planning often decides whether at-risk families can actually use a school choice option, and campus accessibility will be a practical factor in how many students the middle school grades ultimately enroll.
The Road Ahead
The commission’s approval puts the burden of execution on the school itself. Growing from a 300-student high school into a combined campus serving roughly 465 students — including middle schoolers — will require new staff, revised budgeting and careful attention to the culture that made the school distinctive in the first place. Charter schools that expand too fast have struggled elsewhere in the country, and the commission’s monitoring of ACCEL’s academic and financial health will continue throughout the transition.
Still, the direction is clear. Alabama’s charter sector, barely a few years old, is moving from a cautious pilot phase into measured growth, with new schools being authorized in Tuscaloosa and Livingston alongside Mobile’s expansion. For ACCEL, the middle school grades represent the most ambitious test yet of its founding idea — that students at risk of dropping out respond to small classes, flexible schedules and adults who know them individually, and that the earlier those supports begin, the better the odds that a struggling twelve-year-old becomes a graduate with a plan.
The Dropout Problem the School Was Built to Answer
The expansion only makes sense against the backdrop of the problem ACCEL was created to address. Alabama’s high school graduation rate has climbed steadily over the past decade, but the students who still leave school without a diploma share familiar traits: they fall behind in the middle grades, they accumulate course credits too slowly to recover, and by the time anyone intervenes formally, the distance to a diploma feels impossible to close. Mobile County, with a school system spread across a sprawling county of urban neighborhoods, suburbs and rural communities, sees that pattern from Dauphin Island Parkway to Prichard to Semmes.
ACCEL’s founders designed the school as a second chance with structure. The Day and Evening Academy in its name reflects a schedule built around real lives — students who work, students with young children of their own, students who moved schools so often their credits scattered across transcripts. Flexible scheduling and individualized pacing exist so that none of those circumstances automatically translates into failure. Teachers and counselors track each student’s progress individually, and the school’s small size is a deliberate feature rather than a budget constraint: every student is known by name, and an absence triggers a phone call rather than a form letter.
Bringing middle schoolers into that environment extends the same philosophy to an age when the first warning signs appear. A sixth grader who misses weeks of school, a seventh grader reading years below grade level, an eighth grader who has stopped seeing the point of the classroom — these are the students the expansion is aimed at, reached before the diploma is in doubt rather than after. If the model works at that earlier age, supporters argue, the school’s high school grades will inherit students who arrive already on solid footing, and the county’s dropout pipeline will narrow at the point where it is cheapest and easiest to fix.