McCartney Academy is the long horizon of the Enclave's Educational work — a lineage-centered private K–12 institution named in honor of Ralph McCartney, a Liberty City community elder, oral historian, and veteran of decades of displacement resistance whose life of service was honored on the floor of the United States Congress by Congresswoman Carrie Meek. The Academy is the long horizon by design. Schools are not built in budget cycles. They are built in generations.
The Name
Ralph McCartney grew up in Overtown and Liberty City. He was a community organizer before the term existed as a job title. When the Florida Department of Transportation drew the lines for I-95 and I-395 through the heart of Overtown in the 1950s and 1960s, McCartney was among those who documented what was lost: not just buildings, but a fully self-sufficient Black community — one where, as he put it in a 1997 oral history recorded by the University of Florida Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, "never did a hungry person cross that door and leave out that same way." A community where teachers and principals were "like extended members of the family." A community where the whole neighborhood was a governance structure.
The expressways destroyed that. The McCartney Academy exists because the community that produced it understands what was taken, has named the mechanism that took it, and has decided to rebuild it — not to recover what was lost, but to build something that cannot be taken again.
Ralph McCartney was security staff at Charles R. Drew K-8 Center in Liberty City during the years the Chairman of this institution attended that school. He was present in the halls Israel Lee walked. The Academy is named in his honor because the lineage is not metaphorical. It is physical. It runs through the same buildings, the same blocks, the same families.
Mission
To provide a private, lineage-centered, accredited K–12 education that prepares the next generation of stewards, builders, and leaders — equally fluent in STEM and emerging technologies, in classical and lineage-centered humanities, in civic literacy and the practice of self-governance.
The McCartney Academy does not produce workers for an economy that has systematically excluded the lineage. It produces the architects, technologists, legal scholars, farmers, artists, economists, and governors who build what comes next.
The Gap This School Fills
Liberty City's public school pipeline is structured around Charles R. Drew K-8 Center — the same school Ralph McCartney guarded — and Miami Northwestern Senior High School. Miami Northwestern has a gifted track. It produces graduates who go to college. It also produces graduates who don't. And the gap between what those graduates encounter at the end of that pipeline and what institutional life in America requires of Black people has never been fully addressed by the public system — because the public system was not designed to address it.
The McCartney Academy does not compete with public education. It supplements, extends, and deepens what public education cannot provide: a curriculum in which the lineage is the subject, not the appendage. A school where the history taught is not the version produced by the system that enforced the exclusion. A school where STEM instruction is paired with the cosmological and ethical frameworks that give technology meaning. A school where self-governance is taught as a subject, not merely modeled in student council.
Private education in this tradition has a name: it is what HBCUs were built to do at the college level. McCartney Academy is the K–12 expression of that same institution-building imperative.
Curriculum Philosophy
Lineage-centered humanities. History, literature, philosophy, and civics taught from the perspective of the lineage's intellectual tradition — Douglass, Wells, Du Bois, Baker, Baldwin, Welsing, hooks, West, and the living scholars and organizers extending that work. This is not supplemental "diversity" content. It is the primary framework.
STEM and emerging technologies. Mathematics, computer science, data literacy, agricultural technology, and agentic AI fundamentals — taught as tools of sovereignty, not only as pathways to employment. Students who graduate from McCartney Academy will be capable of building the institutions they need, not only applying to work in institutions built by others.
Self-governance as a subject. Civic literacy is not a semester of government class. It is a K–12 throughline — beginning with cooperative decision-making in early grades and building through parliamentary procedure, policy analysis, legal literacy, and the practice of institutional governance. The Academy trains its students to run the room. Every room.
Classical foundations. Language, logic, rhetoric, and the Western classical canon — not as the summit of human achievement, but as one strand in a global intellectual tradition that includes African, Indigenous, Asian, and Islamic philosophical lineages. Students graduate able to engage every intellectual tradition on its own terms and none as the default.
Roadmap
The Academy is in foundation phase. The roadmap is published transparently.
Phase I — Foundation (2026–2027): 501(c)(3) structure confirmed and separate legal entity established. Founding board seated with educators, legal counsel, and community elders. Site identified in Liberty City — preference for property within the Charles R. Drew / Miami Northwestern corridor. Curriculum framework drafted. Teacher recruitment and compensation structure established. Accreditation pathway initiated through the Florida Council of Independent Schools (FCIS) or equivalent recognized body.
Phase II — Pilot (2027–2028): Soft-launch with a single grade cohort (target: K or Grade 6). Curriculum field-tested with founding students. Accreditation inspection scheduled. Partnership network formed — HBCUs for dual-enrollment pathways, allied K–12 institutions for faculty exchange, and adjacent Enclave programs (FarmBlock for agricultural curriculum, Block to the Boardroom for civic education, BDI Dataset for data literacy).
Phase III — Build-Out (2028–2030): Grade-by-grade expansion to full K–12. Permanent facility in Liberty City. Accreditation completed. First graduating class targeted for the end of the decade. Founding endowment established to ensure the Academy's independence from annual fundraising cycles.
Doctrine
Education is the slow work.
It does not yield in a quarter or a budget cycle. It yields in a generation. The Enclave's commitment to McCartney Academy is the commitment of a steward — built for the people who will inherit it, not for the people who started it.
The Academy is designed to outlast its founders. That is not a platitude. It is an architectural requirement. Every governance structure, every curriculum framework, every financial model is designed to function without the founding generation present. The school exists to teach sovereignty. It begins by practicing it.
Get Involved
Donate to the Founding Fund — every dollar is tracked, published, and permanent: /donate/
Interest — Parents & Families — leave your contact for founding cohort enrollment notification: /coalition/apply/ (note "McCartney Academy" in message)
Partner as an institution — HBCUs, foundations, K–12 networks, accreditation-adjacent organizations: /contact/
Apply to teach, advise, or join the founding board: /coalition/apply/
Memorialize — naming opportunities for wings, classrooms, fellowships, and scholarships in honor of an elder or ancestor: /contact/
Volunteer — curriculum developers, legal counsel, education researchers, community organizers: /volunteer/