The members of the Chantilly English Department commit themselves to helping each student develop communications skills to the fullest capacity. The department believes that each student has unique capabilities, interests and talents and that the department serves students best by helping them to realize their language potential and to grow toward personal maturity.

The English staff has developed a writing program based on the sound foundation of the most current research, theory and practice in writing instruction. Our program respects the diversity of the student population. It provides opportunities for the academically weak student to succeed, while at the same time it challenges the gifted. Chantilly's students will graduate into an increasingly information-based, technological society. Students have the opportunity to practice information retrieval and to do a variety of research activities.

The English Department sees one of its major roles as helping young people branch out emotionally and intellectually. The reading of imaginative literature takes the students out of the narrow confines of the familiar and confronts them with experiences that reach out to their senses, feelings and minds. As students' responses grow more sensitive and sophisticated, they become more capable of sympathy, more aware of the range of human possibility.