Let your child experience what it’s really like to be an Alpha student!
Come step into the world of Alpha for a full Shadow Day: an immersive, all-day event where your child will participate in core academics, guide-led life skills workshops, and more.
A Shadow Day is hands-down the best way to discover if your kid would thrive at Alpha. We hope to see you there!
Parents are welcome to stay after drop-off for brunch and a chance to ask questions.
A new AI-powered school is changing the way Raleigh students learn.
A game-changingapproach to learning is landing in the City of Oaks. Enter Alpha School, an AI-powered private school opening a K–5 campus in North Raleigh come January, building on its fleet of sites across the country, including Austin, Miami, LA, DC and Dallas, with a Charlotte location on deck.
Before you get hung up on the “AI” of it all, Alpha’s model is far from screen-obsessed. Students spend just ~two hours on core academics each morning via adaptive tech—broken into 25-minute bursts—before shifting into screen-free, collaborative afternoons spent building life skills. Think public speaking, entrepreneurship, coding, science labs and passion projects—all led by coach-style Guides.
“We’ve been known as the ‘screentime school’—but that’s just not true,” says a school spokesperson, noting two hours of screens is standard in today’s classrooms. The difference? Alpha’s tech delivers 1:1 lessons crafted to each child’s learning strengths and preferences. So visual learners learn visually, audio learners lean into sound—and students with ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. benefit from adaptive pacing and targeted support.
While digital tools drive the core academics, connection is crucial to the school’s philosophy. Guides form real bonds with students through daily engagement like Morning Launch, aka creative prompts and activities to kick-start interaction.
And the afternoons are where Alpha truly breaks the mold. Students dive into 24 life skills designed to equip them for the ever-evolving world—starting early and building confidence along the way.
The school credits its model with students learning twice as fast as their peers—and actually enjoying and looking forward to school. Plus: no homework, no grades and no traditional pressure.
While Alpha School’s Raleigh campus currently only hosts 25 K–5th-graders, annual expansion is typical, with one or two grades and new buildings added based on interest and demand. So, if growth follows the national trend, this learning model could very well reshape what “going to school” looks like—here and across the country. alpha.school
Talk about a hot ticket: Wake Tech’s highly anticipated IGNITE event sparks inspiration through powerful stories about the community college’s impact.
People across Raleigh love Wake Tech. However, as Wake Tech VP of Development and Strategic Partnerships Matthew Smith began noticing several years ago, many residents felt stumped when they were asked to explain why.
“I went back to my team and said, ‘We’ve got to figure out a way to tell our story because our college is really a hidden gem in Wake County,’” he recalls. “We’re not just a school—in my opinion, we really are the economic backbone of this community. We are the only educational institution that just cares about Wake County. That’s our differentiator.”
He came up with IGNITE, an event that would showcase the community college’s mission of giving every person in Wake County an opportunity to pursue higher ed and make their life better. Fast-forward to today and his brainchild is still going strong, with the seventh annual IGNITE, taking place April 15 at the Raleigh Convention Center, expected to be the most successful—and emotionally stirring—yet.
IGNITE’s “secret sauce,” as Smith calls it, lies in the real-life stories of resilience and triumph highlighted throughout the program. “At every IGNITE event, the president and I are onstage for about five minutes at the beginning and five at the end,” he explains, “and everything in the middle is people whose lives have been directly impacted by our college telling their stories.”
The heartstring-tugging tales from past IGNITE events resonate in myriad ways. Take Wake Tech graduate Carrie Fisher and Assistant Professor of Cosmetology Valerie Bishop, whose lives are forever intertwined after Fisher saved Bishop’s life by giving her a kidney. Or Jorge Goti, who came to NC from Cuba and credits Wake Tech’s English as a Second Language program for not only teaching him English but also “how to make a life in this country and this community,” he says.
Then there’s Michael Denning, who says the knowledge he gained from his time at Wake Early College of Health and Sciences “prepared and propelled” him to transfer to ECU to pursue his dream career in medicine. And, finally, Eddie Mutebi—who grew up in a Uganda orphanage—is thankful for a partnership between Wake Tech and the nonprofit Embrace Uganda for helping him enroll at WTCC when his sponsor didn’t pay his university tuition. Mutebi’s experience ultimately led him to his current role as a data scientist at IBM, while continuing to provide “critical support and resources to my family back in Uganda,” he shares.
This year, IGNITE’s sold-out crowd of more than 750 local business leaders and community influencers will gather to hear even more firsthand accounts of how Wake Tech is making a difference. That includes Khadijah Scarborough, a former foster kid who came to Wake Tech “under unbelievable circumstances,” says Smith. “And now this young woman not only graduated from Wake Tech, but with a nursing degree—and she’s working at Johns Hopkins Medical Center.”
Smith reveals IGNITE’s 2024 theme will be Heroes in the Hallway, a chance to spotlight Wake Tech faculty and staff who have quietly rallied around students to help them succeed. “The people we’re featuring this year are the ones who are doing the gritty, hands-on work,” says Smith. “The one who gets the phone call from the foster kid at 10pm saying, ‘I don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight.’ The one who’s working with the autistic student who barely communicates but knows she wants to do something with her life.”
Ultimately, Smith is proud to have created something that “hopefully will have a long-lasting effect… and, more than anything, emotionally connect with people in this community,” he says. “Everybody who goes to that program knows someone similar to what we’re presenting onstage.”
So, why do people across Raleigh—and the region—love Wake Tech? Because its story is our own—and an event that helps individuals and companies recognize we’re all in this together may be the key to real and lasting support for the community college and its life-changing programs.
WEB EXCLUSIVE After much debate, the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) has decided to delay students’ return to campuses and begin the school year through online instruction.
Back in April, when Wake County Public Schools initially closed and switched to remote learning, education officials were made aware that many students did not have access to the internet or proper technology necessary to continue their classes. In order to provide for those students, WCPSS partnered with Activate Good, a nonprofit organization that mobilizes volunteers to improve the community, to help configure over 10,000 hotspots for families without internet access.
Now, WCPSS has called on Activate Good again to help distribute over 40,000 laptops and 10,000 more hotspots for the upcoming school year. They are committed to getting the necessary technology to students as quickly as possible in order to make the start of the new school year as seamless as possible. Marlo Gaddis, Chief Technology Officer for WCPSS, says that their partnership with Activate Good has been critical during this time.
“The need for volunteer support in our community has increased overall during the pandemic,” says Amber Smith, executive director of Activate Good. “We especially hope the community will rally around kids and families as they return to school this month. Volunteers can really make a huge difference here to make sure thousands of kids will have access to the same learning opportunities as their peers this year.”
Activate Good hopes to recruit hundreds of volunteers to support this effort in safety distributing laptops to an estimated 40,000 families over the next couple weeks. Volunteers will help guide families when they arrive to pick up their devices at one of five school pick-up locations across Wake County. Social distancing, mask requirements, regular cleaning and other safety measures will be taken to ensure volunteers feel safe. Shifts begin Monday, August 17.
Raleigh’s Civil War Round Table uses history as a lens to understanding what unites and divides us.
Once a month, members of the Raleigh Civil War Round Table file into the Daniels Auditorium in the North Carolina Museum of History. Meetings begin like all good and true Southern gatherings—with food—and then, the members seat themselves. Accents are as diverse as the group itself; all voices come to a hush as a lecturer starts speaking.
The Raleigh CWRT is not, as current president Ted Kunstling is quick to point out, a political or heritage group. Since its inception in 2001, the organization’s aim has been to study the Civil War with an even-keel approach to history, through monthly newsletters, lectures, occasional field trips, and a resource-rich website. “The same rain falls on friend and foe” is the newsletter’s motto, the filter through which members approach this era.
“Through every month, we have a different speaker coming from a different perspective and I think the context continues to enlarge,” says member Josephine Walker. “And so we get a very well-rounded understanding of the war.”
“It occurred in our country, with Americans against Americans, it’s all around us,” Kunstling adds. “To try to understand the Civil War is central to understanding our country.”
Members share a proclivity for being drawn in by personal stories, those that are passed down by fathers, mothers, grandparents, relatives — on either side of the conflict.
Kunstling’s Quaker ancestors ran a station on the Underground Railroad. His great-grandfather sat up nights, listening to the escapees’ pursuers gallop past his home.
Founder Bob Farrell began researching New York’s 123rd regiment because it was from his home county; 35 years and hundreds of letter transcriptions later, he’s still studying.
Founding member Griff Bartlett’s family was from the border state of Maryland. One great-grandfather helped build the ironclad ship Monitor for the Union, while another fought for the South.
“We’re not so much worried about who charged up what hill and took what position, as much as learning about the personalities of the people, and some of the events, and how they came [about],” Bartlett says.
While each member came to the group intrigued by stories, they stay to peel back more layers each year, and, as the CWRT reveals layers, members add flesh to the bare bones of history.
Studying the mundane—the manufacturing of buttons, homefront habits, music, horses, microeconomics—takes priority as a way of understanding the bigger picture. When you begin to look at the participants of history as flesh-and-blood human beings, things become at once lucid and complex. Your heart aches for the enslaved, your mind yearns to understand the mindsets of soldiers—enlisting out of intention, blind duty or youthful bravado—defending a practice that is, today, indefensible,
Kunstling says there’s no better way to bring the reality of war home than to walk the ground it was fought on.
In Raleigh, earthworks went up throughout the city in anticipation of the Union’s approach. William Peace University couldn’t open as planned when the war broke out; it was converted into a Confederate hospital and girls whose dormitory was originally a mortuary claim men in gray still wander the halls. On Morgan Street, Confederate cavalryman Robert Walsh, meant to oversee a peaceful surrender, galloped away after firing a pistol at 10,000 Federal troops. Where Lake Wheeler Road meets Saunders Street, Union general John “Black Jack” Logan stopped an angry band of Federal troops intent on bringing retribution for President Lincoln’s recent assassination. Logan was inducted into the Raleigh Hall of Fame for saving the city.
When it comes to the debate regarding Confederate memorials around town, the official position of the Round Table is to have no position, although the group disapproves of unlawful damage to property. Individual members themselves have strong and varying opinions.
Ultimately, members are not military buffs, politicians or philosophers, but they are historians. Searching the interactions of complex human beings promises to provide rich material for decades to come.
