Excel Academy was founded with a clear vision. The vision was to create a public school that would close the educational opportunity gap afflicting the mostly poor, immigrant families living in East Boston and Chelsea, Massachusetts. At that time, the quality of public schooling options available to these young people was much lower than the schools available to their wealthier peers in and outside of Boston.
In 2002, Yutaka Tamura entered the Building Excellent Schools (BES) Fellowship Program to learn how to design, apply for, and open a public charter school in Massachusetts. In 2003, he was granted a charter for Excel Academy Charter School in East Boston with an ambitious mission that still guides our schools today:
The mission of Excel Academy is to prepare students for high school and college, apply their learning to solve relevant problems, and engage productively in their communities.
After 9 years of operating a small single-site public charter middle school in East Boston, Excel was chosen as a “proven provider” based on historic performance and was granted two additional charters by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to add new schools. In 2011, Excel’s second school opened in Chelsea, Massachusetts. In 2012, our third middle school, in the Orient Heights neighborhood of East Boston, opened.
The year 2015 brought the opening of Excel Academy Charter High School, Excel’s first high school. The school is spending its first year in a temporary facility in South Boston. Starting with the 2016-2017 academic year, Excel Academy Charter High School will operate in a brand-new, 55,000-square foot building on Bremen Street in East Boston, right up the road from our other two East Boston campuses and next to a new Boston Public Library.
