June 29th, 2026
Dear Great Path Academy community,
Congratulations on an incredible and highly successful 2025–2026 school year! On behalf of the faculty and staff at Great Path Academy, we want to extend our deepest gratitude to you for choosing GPA to educate your children and for partnering with us all year to help them learn, lead, and grow. We are immensely proud of the accomplishments of our students this year, all of which culminated in a beautiful graduation ceremony for the Class of 2026 on Thursday, June 18th. Our graduates truly exemplified the power of our Middle College mission, collectively completing over 100 college courses and earning more than 315 college credit hours! Congratulations to our new graduates—we wish them the absolute best as they take their next steps into the future!
This morning, we sent out the final report cards of the year, which include fourth marking period grades, final exams, and end-of-year calculations. We are thrilled to celebrate the hard work of our students and proudly announce our 4th Marking Period Honor Roll. You can view the honor roll here.
Reflecting on this past year, our school community has achieved extraordinary academic growth. Thanks to our students' focus and the dedication of our staff, we saw scale-score jumps across the entire SAT and PSAT Suite of Assessments in both Evidence-Based Reading & Writing (ERW) and Mathematics for Grades 9, 10, and 11. Furthermore, our school-wide Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) proficiency increased by an impressive 10 percentage points over last year's baseline. Our Multilingual Learners also demonstrated excellent growth, with a minimum of 10% of our students successfully accelerating out of the 'Beginning' threshold on the overall LAS Links assessment, showing remarkable gains in critical academic reading.
In addition to our classroom achievements, our students thrived in athletic and recreational spaces this year, showcasing incredible teamwork, strategy, and resilience. Our new participation program with Bulkeley High School in CIAC sports launched our students to represent Great Path Academy with immense pride and dedication on the field. At the same time, our Esports team enjoyed a competitive season sharpening their digital collaboration, while we launched our climbing curriculum as both a club and within the physical education curriculum.
Looking ahead to the 2026–2027 school year, we are committed to cultivating an even brighter future for our learners by expanding our unique middle college model. We are excited to announce new articulated college courses for next year across our core Math, Science, and English departments, expanding our dual-enrollment pathways so students can earn even more tuition-free college credits while concurrently fulfilling their high school requirements. Furthermore, we are deepening our national partnership with the Middle College National Consortium (MCNC), which will include sending GPA student representatives to the upcoming national MCNC Student Conference in Ohio in May 2027—an incredible opportunity for our youth to practice leadership and student agency on a national stage.
In tandem with these collegiate advancements, we are thrilled to spotlight and continue our highly impactful partnership with ReadyCT, which has been a cornerstone of our career-readiness programming since 2022. ReadyCT connects K-12 education with the local business sector, and over the last four years, this collaboration has brought incredible workforce development directly into our school culture. To date, 156 students have engaged as pathway participants, and 246 students have completed Work-Based Learning (WBL) opportunities across 21 distinct campus activities. Our students have done the real work of career preparation—crafting 71 professional resumes, completing 69 rigorous mock interviews, and achieving 60 C3 career lesson completions. As we look to the immediate future, 30 student internships are currently pending for our upperclassmen. This specialized partnership ensures our students leave GPA uniquely equipped to navigate both competitive higher-education tracks and the rapidly changing global workforce. With this partnership, GPA has received new grant funding to support robotics programming for the 2026-2027 school year to continue to prepare students for STEM pathways.
To ensure our students are fully supported and confident heading into these rigorous college-level humanities and STEM pathways, we are adding additional tutoring support throughout the upcoming school year. We are also expanding our specialized summer programming, including our annual Summer Bridge Program for incoming students, a targeted SAT Bootcamp in August to give our upperclassmen a competitive edge in math and literacy, and a variety of credit-recovery options to keep all students on track for graduation.
Expect to hear from us in mid-July with updates on our summer preparations, followed by our official back-to-school packet during the first week of August. Attached to this message you will find important dates for the start of the year, the district calendar, and our bell schedule. Our website has also been fully updated with these resources: https://www.hartfordschools.org/o/gpa.
We look forward to seeing all of our returning students for the first day of school on Tuesday, August 25th, 2026. If you need to reach us this summer, our main office will be open Monday through Thursday from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM, and Fridays from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, beginning Monday, June 29th through August 7th. Please note that our offices will be closed on Friday, July 3rd, 2026, in observance of Independence Day. You can always reach the main office at 860-512-3700. Be sure to follow our official Instagram and Facebook pages to see summer highlights and information.
We wish every GPA family a safe, restful, and fun-filled summer break!
Respectfully,
Dr. Jessica Fitzgerald, Principal