BROWNSVILLE — The Ascend charter network opened two more schools inside the former Pitkin Theater building last week — and has plans to tack on a high school next year — in a bid to keep up with parent demand, officials said.
The charter network added the Central Brooklyn Ascend Lower school, an elementary school that started with 163 kindergarten and first-grade students, and Brownsville Ascend Middle school, which enrolled 88 sixth-graders in the building on Pitkin and Saratoga avenues.
The two new schools join the charter network's existing elementary school, Brownsville Ascend Lower, which is K-5 and has operated in the building since 2009.
Officials said they opted to create a separate new elementary school while maintaining their existing one because demand from parents was so high that “thousands” of students still remain on waitlists to get in.
Like at all Ascend schools, students at the new Brownsville schools were chosen by random lottery, with preference given to those kids who live in the district where the school is located. Other than location, there are no requirements — academic or otherwise — to get into an Ascend school, officials said.
Central Brooklyn Ascend Lower will eventually expand to include kindergarten to fifth grade and will offer a curriculum very similar to the one at Brownsville Ascend Lower, according to director Michelle Flowers.
Flowers added that the new elementary school has one unique difference: daily “morning motivation” sessions, or mini-pep rallies, held after breakfast each day to make “school feel less like a chore,” she said.
“That’s when we start our chanting and cheering and getting our college pride on and get our scholars thinking about what they’re going be doing for today,” she said.
Next year, Ascend plans to open a fourth school, a high school, inside the Pitkin Theater building, with about 50 students in the inaugural freshman class, organizers said.
“We always dreamed large, but the enthusiasm from the parents and the size of the waitlist in this community is much beyond what we thought would be the case,” said Ascend charter network founder and CEO Steven Wilson, who runs five other sites in Brooklyn.
“We want to create a very distinctive culture and to do that, slow growth is so important. Trying to open a new school to 500 kids in four or five grades is extremely challenging to create anything that’s distinct from, or better than, district schools.”
Brownsville Ascend middle school, overseen by school director Emily Fernandez, will eventually grow to include sixth through eighth grade and founders hope to be able to accommodate students from each of the charter's elementary schools, organizers said.
Preparation for college is built into the new schools’ curriculum, with seminar-style “literature circles” starting in kindergarten, collaborative mathematical problem-solving and public policy-centered science instruction.
“It’s very experiment-based … but it’s all around a particular issue, like, what should I do with my computer when I’m ready to throw it out?” Fernandez said.
The schools' pro-college culture is on display at dismissal, as kids line up to wait for pickup behind orange traffic cones — each marked with the name of the students' homerooms, which in turn are named after the college or university where their teacher attended.
Wilson said the college names are drawn to help students emphasize higher education as early as possible.
“That’s the alma mater of the teacher so that [the students] identify, OK, where is Smith College? OK, where is Brooklyn College?” he said. “It’s trying to create a mindset of, you know, this is who we are. We are people who go to college.”
All seven Ascend schools are located in privately-held buildings and do not share space with traditional public schools, he said. And though a private developer created the Brownsville schools’ facilities, day-to-day operating funds come from the Department of Education, just like any other public school, he said.
