Cultivating Leaders with
Heart at America’s
Happiest School
Learn More
If your family is ready for a school that knows your children can be happy, healthy, AND successful, then it’s time to try Centner Academy. Fill out the form to start the enrollment process.
Helping Your Child Bee All They Can Bee
At Centner Academy, we believe that students learn best when using their minds to solve problems, create solutions, and collaborate with peers to make the world a better place.
We believe that every student, every teacher, every parent, and every leader has responsibility on this planet to pursue learning and growth in every activity of our lives.
Because our whole community is dedicated to being better for our world, we love learning, embrace mistakes as opportunities to grow, and challenge ourselves to be both loving and candid in our relationships with one another.
Centner Academy Signature Programs
Entrepreneurship
Brain Optimization Program
Technology & Innovation
Conscious Discipline
Mindfulness
Regener8 Farm & Retreat and Garden Beds
Foreign Languages
Theater
Regener8 - Our Farm!
Centner Academy shares a close alignment with Regener8 Farm and Retreat, a 34-acre agriculture and retreat property owned by David and Leila Centner. Located in South Miami only 35 minutes from the school, Regener8 will provide farm-to-cafeteria regeneratively- and hydroponically-grown nutrition, while weaving in a wide breadth of curricula encompassing science, entrepreneurship, and nutrition. There’s simply nothing like this in America!
Preschool, Elementary, Middle & High School
At Centner Academy, learning is authentic, complex, and intellectually engaging. Students do real work as authors, artists, inventors, explorers, athletes, and mathematicians. Giving students choice, autonomy, and high expectations for growth, we harness intrinsic motivation as the engine for academic excellence. Our academics are fueled by a strong foundation and emphasis on mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
Through an interdisciplinary and inquiry-based program, students discover and master foundational skills in academic disciplines while learning to grapple with the unknown, embrace multiple perspectives, and create innovative solutions.
Students develop social and emotional skills that promote self-confidence, emotional intelligence, positive communication, and collaboration.
Our students are empowered to be themselves, to embrace learning fully and to contribute to the community as stewards and changemakers. We believe empathetic citizens change the world.
Fast Facts
FACULTY
AVERAGE CLASS SIZE
%
MINDFULNESS CERTIFIED DISCIPLINE
ANNUAL INVESTMENT IN TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Our Core Values
Project Based Learning
Our Middle Schoolers participate in Science Fair, Bee Happy Marketplace, Earth Day, Math World Wide Competitions, and Entrepreneurship Activities to help them learn in the real world, not just in classrooms.
Social Emotional Learning
Centner Academy leverages Conscious Discipline and focuses on mindfulness throughout the school day. All of our classrooms have Zen Zones for meditation and our Middle Schoolers actively participate in Big Life journaling to help them reflect and grow.
Differentiated Instruction
We believe in meeting children where they are and helping them grow from there. In Elementary School, we ability group and content-accelerate students based on readiness.
Cross-Curricular Instruction
Our faculty help students connect their learning across subjects by using a literature-based curriculum, and real world mathematics. Our five available language programs also integrate cultural education to help our students develop empathy for people across the world.
Instead of teaching students what to think, we teach them how to think.
Critical Race Theory & Gender Fluidity
As our world continues to shift rapidly, we have now found ourselves in a time of more controlled messaging from the media and unprecedented censorship in the United States. The repeated messaging from the media shapes cultural norms and the way we view social and cultural issues. Rather than jump on board with the mass media’s storyline, we challenge our students to question, research, analyze and consider issues from multiple perspectives before coming to their own conclusions.
For this reason, as a school, WE DO NOT PROMOTE OR TEACH CRITICAL RACE THEORY, Gender Fluidity, or the mainstream narrative surrounding Covid, all hot topics that many schools are now choosing to teach as factual rather than as the theories they are.
After School Programs
After Care- Functional Exercise
- Architectural Design
- Architectural Fashion Design
- Preschool Art
- Awesome Science
- Ballet Preschool
- Basketball
- Budokon
- Cheer and Dance
- Chess
- Handwriting Clinic Preschool
- Homework Help
- Jewish Studies
- Keyboarding
- Lego Robotics
- Makers Lab
- Martial A. Preschool
- Pottery
- Private Piano 0 Drums Lessons
- Cooking Around the World
- Cyber Security 101
- Drama Club
- Espo. and Coding
- French
- Rhythmic Gymnastics
- Singing
- Soccer
- Tennis
- Boxing Fitness (no contact)
Parents Testimonials
Luciana
“Being the parent of two young girls, it’s very important for me to bring them into a place where they feel comfortable and happy.”
Our Process
Schedule a Tour
Our application process begins with a private tour with a member of the friendly Centner Academy Admissions team. We are looking forward to meeting your family and learning more about your children.
Apply
After you fill out our Inquiry Form, we will provide you with access to our Online Admissions Portal.
Interview
Prospective students and families will be invited for interviews to make sure our school family is a great fit.
Decision
The Admissions Team sends decisions by email. If your family is accepted, you will have two weeks to accept or decline our admission offer and complete the enrollment contract.
Preschool Campus
4136 N MIAMI AVE
MIAMI, FL 33127
Elementary School Campus
Newly renovated campus (opening soon)
Middle School Campus
1911 NE MIAMI CT
MIAMI, FL 33132
FOLLOW US
@CentnerAcademy
Cultivating Leaders with Heart
Copyright Centner Academy – 2022
Entrepreneurship
Centner Academy’s Entrepreneurship Program provides all students with the experience of launching and growing their own business. As they move through product development, students pitch their business plans in a real world “shark tank” to obtain seed capital. They practice sales and marketing as they prepare for our series of Bee Happy Marketplaces. As students create and deliver their goods and services, they explore finance and management aspects of business ownership. Along the way, students develop creativity, resilience, and confidence while applying lessons from across the curriculum. Centner Academy’s Entrepreneurship Program allows students to experience the transformative power of mutually beneficial, free market exchange and challenges students to use these skills to meet society’s needs.
Brain Optimization Program
Elementary & Middle School PE & Brain Optimization: In our Brain Optimization Program, which doubles as our PE program, we focus on neuromuscular connection. Through physical movement, we are able to create efficient neural-pathways or superhighways that deliver and receive information in the most efficient and direct manner. We achieve this by using a combination of physical activities that include functional exercises, corrective exercises, plyometrics, and sports academy-style obstacle courses. We also learn and play 9 different sports a year divided into 4-week segments. During these segments, the students engage in specific exercises to strengthen the prime moving muscles and various muscle synergies associated with the sport and skill of focus. The students learn techniques, tactics, and rules of the game and are able to compete and take advantage of their acquired skill sets during our competition week at the end of each course. Students participate in PE every day.
Preschool Kinesthetics & Brain Optimization: The Brain Optimization Program at Centner Academy’s Preschool campus features daily kinesthetic classes. These classes are designed to support efficient neuromuscular connections which aid in optimal brain development. We provide various opportunities through movement that support sensory integration and development. Through natural functional movements, students have a chance to create synapses in the brain stem to solidify the development of balance and coordination. Through the consistent use of purposeful and meaningful activities, our students are challenged and supported in development of their fundamental gross motor skills. Proper motor development and function sets a strong foundation for academic success in, and out, of the classroom.
Interactive Metronome (IM) Program: An evidence-based training and assessment tool, proven to improve cognition, attention, focus, memory, speech/language, executive functioning as well as motor and sensory skills.
Technology & Innovation
The technology and innovation curriculum introduces concepts and fundamentals in engineering. Students discover pathways in engineering by using interdisciplinary skills in critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, innovation as well as the engineering design process to tackle Maker challenges and Design Build challenges. This year we will challenge the students to solve real world applications of the engineering design process as well as gear into project based learning. In the last quarter, students will prepare to innovate and create their own designs as an active engineer in the community while learning how to use their STREAM skills in science, technology, research, engineering, arts and math.
After school technology and innovation activities include Maker’s Lab, Lego Robotics, non-competitive Esports and competitive Esports.
Conscious Discipline
“Discipline is not something you do to children; it is something you develop within them.” — Dr. Becky Bailey, Founder of Conscious Discipline
Incorporating neuroscience and emotional intelligence, Conscious Discipline provides a transformational, whole-school solution for social-emotional learning, discipline and self-regulation. Through building safety and connection and practicing a series of routines, rituals, skills and powers, Conscious Discipline is transformational within schools and families, empowering children and adults to take responsibility for their own feelings and actions, and to contributing to a safe, loving school family.
Mindfulness
Centner Academy’s Mindfulness Program includes all teachers taking the Mindful Schools certification program. Our Mindfulness Team is composed of Ms. Gabriela, Ms. Zeinette, Coach Omeed and Ms. Fernanda, all of whom have extensive experiences, retreats and practices in Mindfulness. The Mindfulness Team supports teachers in implementing a brief meditation during Morning Meeting as well as implementing the Zen Zones which utilize all of the Conscious Discipline Safe Place. The Zen Zones are designed to help children learn to self-regulate.
Regener8 Farm & Retreat and Garden Beds
Regener8 Farm & Retreat is the Centner’s 34-acre farm property in the Redlands in South Miami where a completely sustainable (energy, food and water) regenerative agriculture farm and overnight retreat center is being built from scratch. Centner Academy students participated in their first field trip to the farm last April 2022 and will resume Regener8 field trips in November 2022. We are also in the process of developing a unique regenerative farm curriculum. This curriculum will integrate the entrepreneurial and regenerative farm skills program into Centner Academy’s school’s curriculum through theory, skills, experiences, and other elements in cooperation with the school community. Some of the regenerative farm skills that will be explored include composting, chicken care and management, soil building, hydroponics, aquaponics nursery keeping, bee care, and food forestry among many others.
Regener8 will also offer Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmshare boxes. The main share will consist primarily of vegetables, but we will quickly be adding other items straight from the farm such as honey, eggs, fish, and even baked goods. We will send more information about signing up as the season approaches soon, so please be on the lookout for that!
Our Elementary & Middle School Campus will be installing 16 Garden Beds in the Recess Field behind the building. Each grade level will maintain 2 garden beds as part of their weekly Regener8 class.
Foreign Languages
As an International School, Centner Academy is proud to provide five foreign language choices for its Elementary and Middle School students: French, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish and Mandarin. German will be offered as a Friday Elective. Preschool students experience Mandarin and Spanish languages in an immersive style format. Our Foreign Language Program is unique in that it is focused on true language acquisition. All o four Foreign Language Teachers are trained in the Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) method.
Theater
Our Theater Program is designed to foster the development of individual and group skills in the multiple elements of theater. Students will improve their voices, develop control of their bodies, move around on stage and take direction, learn to perform in front of a camera, read and analyze a play or script, and communicate well with others on and off stage. Theater will be offered as a Friday Elective and as an After School Activity.