Global Outreach Charter Academy is the first public school for foreign languages in Duval County.
Critical Language Education
At Global Outreach Charter Academy, all teachers are certified professionals and teach all core classes and electives in English. GOCA's distinguishing feature is that Russian is taught to all students from Kindergarten through 8th grade. Students also have the opportunity to study additional languages, like Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French and German, after school.
GOCA is a charter school which complies with the same requirements as all public schools and upholds the highest academic and disciplinary standards.
An Award-Winning Heritage
GOCA's educational model was first developed and field-tested in the multilingual melting-pot of Sacramento, California. The school now known as Community Outreach Academy (COA) pioneered a method of intensive training in the core subject areas with a special focus on Russian as a foreign language, making it a mandatory component of the school-wide curriculum. COA has won numerous academic accolades and awards, and has maintained its status as one of the most academically successful public schools in the Sacramento area for over a decade.
Instructional Innovation & Autonomy
The founder of COA, Mr. Sergey Soroka, is also the founder of GOCA in Jacksonville, a school which places great emphasis on student mastery of the Next Generation Sunshine State Standards in all subjects.
GOCA's high faculty to student ratio guarantees that all students receive more personal attention and a more personalized educational experience than at a traditional public school.
GOCA places great emphasis on results and measurable progress, and strives to prepare every student for the rigors of advanced high school courses and a college education.
Why study foreign languages (like Russian or Chinese)?
Russian and Mandarin Chinese are two of the most widely-spoken languages in the world, with a total of 25% of the world's population speaking either Russian or Chinese fluently.
In our current age of increasing globalization, the advanced economies of Europe and East Asia have become effectively bilingual, using English alongside native languages on a daily basis. In the United States, however, foreign language education has experienced a steep decline within recent years. GOCA's mission is to help reverse that decline, and to produce literate, multilingual and multicultural citizens for a more globalized future.
The world of the twenty-first century--the world of immediately subsequent generations--will not be an English-only world, but an advanced, multilingual, global society. While the majority of global citizens will still be monolingual, it is the multilingual speaker who will be at an advantage, with many more times the options and opportunities of his or her monolingual counterpart.