One of the most meaningful experiences for our eighth-grade students is the Capstone Project, which is a culminating experience that brings together everything our students have learned across their Exploratory classes and challenges them to apply their knowledge to real-world issues. However, beyond its academic application, this project has become a powerful vehicle for community connection, student growth, and the kind of purpose-driven learning that lasts a lifetime.
The Capstone Course invites students to delve deeply into local issues, including poverty and hunger, education, and the environment, through engagement with case studies, expert speakers, and hands-on service experiences. With visits to places like Wiggles and Giggles Daycare, Restoration Rome, the Bagwell Food Pantry, Marglen Industries, Family Resource Center, and the City of Rome Water Filtration Plant, students begin to see firsthand how these issues play out in Floyd County and what organizations are doing to address them. The goal: to work in collaborative teams to design sustainable solutions and present them creatively through podcasts, websites, or even recycled art.
What sets this experience apart is how deeply it synthesizes the wide-ranging skills our students have developed across all of their Exploratory classes. From researching and citing sources to utilizing digital tools like Google Sheets and Canva, from learning to speak with poise to collaborating as a team, students are developing their leadership skills in real and tangible ways. They are setting personal goals, identifying challenges, and creating action plans, not for hypothetical problems, but for the real needs of our community.
But perhaps the most powerful outcomes of the 8th Grade Capstone Project are the ones we didn’t plan for. As students spend their days in unfamiliar service settings, away from their screens and outside of their typical friend groups, they are growing in confidence, kindness, and connection. They come back energized, proud of the hard work they’ve done, and surprised by how much fun they had doing it. They are realizing that even at 13 or 14 years old, their contributions matter.
The 8th Grade Capstone is more than a project; it's a rite of passage that reflects our mission to empower students to learn with passion, act with integrity, and serve with respect. We’re so proud of the work our students are doing and grateful for the community partners who make these experiences possible. Through this journey, our students are not only becoming better learners, but they are also becoming better citizens.
Listen to student-led podcasts about these Capstone projects via the audio links on this page.
