CROWN HEIGHTS — After six years, a pioneering technology high school in Brooklyn will graduate its first class of students who will receive both high school diplomas and associate’s degrees.
The Crown Heights school, Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH, began in 2011 with an idea: to train students in science and technology in partnerships with IBM to get young people career-ready.
Now, 34 P-TECH students will receive their associate’s degrees in applied science at a ceremony at the Barclays Center on Monday and receive a high school diploma at the end of June, the school said. That number is on top of more than 50 students who have graduated early from the school with dual degrees.
Overall, more than half of the school’s first-year cohort will graduate with both the college and high school degrees; 95 percent of that first group will receive a high school diploma.
“This has been a tremendous, tremendous journey,” P-TECH’s founding principal, Rashid Davis, told the graduates at a reception with IBM at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday.
“You are at the beginning of — I’m going to call it an educational revolution. And you have shown … how you rise to the occasion,” he said.
At its founding, the school was the first of its kind in New York, a pilot for a new kind of skills-based, career-focused education that garnered attention all over the country and a visit from President Barack Obama in 2013.
► READ MORE: Principal of P-TECH Leads Students Toward Both a Diploma and a Degree
Now, P-TECH schools are popping up all over the country and world. IBM — which provides mentoring and internships to P-TECH students and jobs to its graduates — is working to open more than 20 such schools this fall to address a skills crisis in America, which has made it difficult for the technology company to hire workers, said Stanley Litow, co-founder of P-TECH and the president emeritus of the IBM Foundation.
“We’ve got to solve this problem. And we can’t be satisfied with just cherry picking at the top kids from middle-income or upper-income communities,” he said. Ninety-six percent of students at Brooklyn’s P-TECH are black or Hispanic.
“The assumption that because of your ZIP code or because of your race, nobody’s going to bet on your future — we can’t accept that,” he said.
Soon-to-be graduates of the school readily admitted at Thursday’s reception they didn’t know what they were getting into when they enrolled six years ago. Some were pushed into the school by adults eager for them to get a college degree through a public high school.
But many now realize how valuable the experience was, they said. BryAnn Sandy, 17, will attend Georgetown University next fall and hopes to become a teacher — a job inspired by her own instructor at P-TECH.
“Freshman year, my technology math teacher impacted me a lot,” she said. “She inspired me to become a math teacher and one day come back to Brooklyn and apply my skills.”
Alec Miller, 20, said his best moment at P-TECH was handing in his “final final” and thinking “thank you P-TECH,” he said.
“The whole walk up to the professor when I was handing it in, I knew that this was not the end of my P-TECH experience, but this was like the beginning of the rest of my life,” he said. He is now a digital optimization intern with IBM.
Davis is very proud of his students, but is impatient to improve the program so that more students graduate with college degrees — despite the fact P-TECH’s graduation rate is already about four times the national average for community college students, according to IBM.
“I will not be happy until we have 100 percent of the cohort moving through ... finishing both high school and college,” he said.
