Our Beliefs

Vision and Mission

To use the power of education, technology, and community to become an engine of opportunity and a force for economic freedom in the South Bronx.

Our mission is to ensure every student graduates with college acceptance letters, high tech skills, real work experience, and a plan to turn those opportunities into a successful career.

Core Values

Our four CORE values (and their related mindsets) represent the commitments that every adult and student must make to enjoy full membership in our school community:

 
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For adults, we go further.  The following beliefs are essential to our work and non-negotiable for our staff.  

About Students

We believe:

  • Our students are intellectually, morally, operationally, and emotionally capable of much more than they know

  • Our job is to guide, support, push, inspire, and applaud them until they understand and pursue their true potential

About Families

The better we understand, respect and connect with our families, the better we serve our students.   We believe:

  • Families love their children and want to see them succeed

  • Our responsibility to students includes a responsibility to build close, honest, respectful relationships with their families and communities

About Outcomes

We believe:

  • Our students’ success is our success and our student’s failure is our failure

  • Adults are the lever of change.

  • Our job is to change the status quo and deliver a path to post-secondary success for every student

  • If any student graduates without a clear, realistic plan for success after high school, that student’s failure is our failure as a team

 

About Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

 We believe in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and we know they are necessary ingredients to the success of our mission. We believe:

DIVERSITY

  • Accepting and appreciating identities, views, and experiences that are different from our own.

  • Building community with a diverse group of students requires a staff that represents many different identities, views, and experiences

EQUITY

  • All students deserve to succeed

  • Each student will need different supports to reach that success.

INCLUSION

  • Every student, parent and staff member must have a say in how our community runs.

  • Our community is stronger, fairer, and happier when everyone has a voice.

 

About Our Team

We believe:

  • A healthy student community reflects a healthy adult community

  • Our student community is happy, supportive, honest and successful when our adult community is happy, supportive, honest, and successful

  • Radical transparency will make our community stronger and our school better.

  • Error is opportunity; we share our weaknesses and help each other grow.

 

About Innovation

We believe:

  • The best school design is the one that gets every kid accepted to college and gives them the skills to land a good job

  • We won’t fully reach this design on day 1, day 100, or day 1,000

  • Our work is experimental, entrepreneurial, and always guided by the question "what will deliver the best outcomes for students?"