Five years ago, the Fortunes and retired educators Bob and Barbara Anders raised enough money to start a school, Academy Prep, on the premise that the right academic springboard could help the city’s most disadvantaged children excel. (Joan Fortune died last year of cancer.)

Today, 80 boys and girls attend Academy Prep, which is modeled after a Jesuit school in New York, in fifth through eighth grades.

The school sits on 2.7 acres of land, largely donated by the Catholic diocese, in a neighborhood where only 25% of ninth-graders finish high school. More than 95% of the school’s students are African-Americans, and most are from single-parent homes.

Applicants are evaluated during a summer program after their fourth-grade year. “We typically zero in on kids who … would probably fall through the cracks if they were left where they were,” says Sam Williams, a New York college educator who last year became head of the school.

The school’s goal is to prepare the students for a local private or boarding school — they get a full scholarship to a private high school — and to instill in them the desire to go to college.

The environment at Academy Prep is structured and demanding. “They must be given order in their lives,” says the school’s principal, Jesse Williams. When classes end at 3:30 p.m., the students help clean the school, followed by activities until 5 p.m. Students who are not on the honor roll must attend study hall until 7 p.m.

All the school’s students qualify for the federal lunch program, the only government aid the school receives.

And all students are on scholarships — cost per student is $12,000 a year. The school operates six days a week and just a few weeks short of 12 months a year. Academy Prep has a small full-time staff and nine volunteer teachers who live in apartments above the classrooms and receive health insurance and bare-bones stipends.

The school, now financed through the Academy Prep Foundation, has strong support from local corporations and individuals and boasts an endowment of $6 million. The St. Pete model soon will be replicated in the Enterprise Zone in Tampa. Down the line, other Academy Preps are being planned for Clearwater and Sarasota.