The first Charter school based on Imaginative Education principles has opened in the Corbett school district in Portland, Oregon. Corbett is a small school district that currently has an Elementary, Middle, and High schools on a single site. Teachers and administrators in the district have been associated with IERG for a number of years.

First IE Charter School opened Sept. 2009.

Corbett, under the leadership of Superintendent, Bob Dunton, has been among the highest performing schools in the US. Newsweek Magazine has rated Corbett High School number one in Oregon for the past two years and as of June 2009 ranked it number 8 in the nation. The full list of rankings: America's Top High Schools, and the video clip: Five Top Schools in Unlikely Places, can be found at www.newsweek.com. (Enter “Corbett” in the Find box.) It should be noted that nearly all the other schools in the top 50 are either expensive private schools or schools for the gifted. Corbett is not well funded and is the only community school in the set. The Corbett board approved the charter school at its Feb. 18 meeting, noting “the new institution will use the principles of “imaginative education,” detailed at www.ierg.net.”

IERG Charter School Pic 2 IERG members have delivered two multi-day workshops over the past few years at the school, and teachers and administrators from the school have attended the IERG conferences and pre-conference workshops. The pictures are from a three-day workshop held at Corbett in June 2009, given by Kieran Egan and Gillian Judson, using the Resource package described on our Home Page and available at http://www.ierg.net/online_store/index.php.