School Vision Project

Rose Arocho-Fullam, Jennifer Carchietta, Bruce Karhoff and Patricia Pena Carty

Lehman College, Educational Leadership

The Principal as a School Building Leader

Professor Rivera-McCutchen

December 3rd, 2012

Phase I: Selecting a Vision for Revison

ABSTRACT

                This project was undertaken by a group of four students of the Lehman College Educational Leadership graduate program. The assignment was to examine all of our current schools’ vision statements, and select and for revision. We decided to focus our research and design on the Bronx Lab School. Based on the data collected from the entire school community and documentation from the Department of Education, we revised the vision statement and aligned it more to the school’s needs and the direction where the school needs to head.

BRONX LAB SCHOOL MISSION

                To prepare for college and life, Bronx Lab School students engage in meaningful and contextual academic work, participate in a nurturing community, explore their passions, and learn to value effort as a means to success.

PHASE II: ASSESSMENT AND DATA COLLECTION

Bronx Lab School is a college preparatory, 9-12 public high school located in the Evander Childs Educational Campus on E. Gun Hill Road in the Williamsburg neighborhood of the Bronx.  The school opened in 2004, one of the dozens of new small schools created under Chancellor Klein and the Bloomberg administration, graduating its first class in June, 2008.  Its founding principal was Marc Sternberg, who led the school for its first five years; Christopher Lagares took the reins in 2009 and is still the school’s principal.

DEMOGRAPHICS

The school is located in zip code 10467.  According to the 2010 U.S. Census, there are just over 97,000 people residing in this zip code, of whom 48.1% are Hispanic/Latino, 33.3% African American/Black, 10.2% White, and 6.4% Asian.  The official unemployment rate among residents in this zip code is 12.1%, and the poverty rate is 26.6%.  Bronx Lab School serves approximately 475 students (http://zip-codes.com). When compared to the community, the school’s demographics are skewed toward groups that have been traditionally disadvantaged.  In the 2010-11 school year, Bronx Lab students were 39% African American/Black and 57% Hispanic/Latino; 96% qualified for free or reduced-price lunch.  Currently, the school serves a relatively low number of English Language Learners (ELL’s)—6.3% of the student population—and approximately 18.8% of the students have Individualized Education Plans (IEP’s).  Some of the ethnic/racial demographic data is summarized in Table 1.

**See attachment for the full Vision Project