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Educator Hopes to Bring Brooklyn Latin-Inspired Charter School to Bronx

By Eddie Small | January 4, 2017 3:16pm
 Greg Rodriguez hopes to open a new charter school in the South Bronx for the 2018-19 school year.
Greg Rodriguez hopes to open a new charter school in the South Bronx for the 2018-19 school year.
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Furwa Jawad

SOUTH BRONX — A New York assistant principal hopes to bring a new charter school to The Bronx that is inspired by the esteemed Brooklyn Latin School and aims to start getting students ready for college as soon as they enter its halls.

Greg Rodriguez, an assistant principal at the UFT Charter School in East New York, hopes to have the Academy for Collegiate Excellence Charter School ready to open for the 2018-19 school year. It would be located somewhere in District 8, which includes neighborhoods such as Hunts Point and Soundview, and serve grades nine through 12, teaching a total of 500 students by its sixth year.

"The basic idea underpinning it in terms of the academic model is to give the kids really challenging work that they would normally get in their first year of college starting in the ninth grade," Rodriguez said, "but coupled with high levels of support."

Rodriguez, who said he previously worked in The Bronx as a teacher at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School and as an assistant principal at Westchester Square Academy, took the Brooklyn Latin School as inspiration for ACE, where 96 percent of students graduated college ready in the 2015-16 year, according to the Department of Education.

He would hope to achieve similar results at his charter school by having each student take part in a "college preparatory" class throughout their four years, which would incorporate tasks like college visits, SAT prep and applying for financial aid right into the school day.

By starting off this process early, Rodriguez hopes to avoid the panic he says he often sees students going through when trying to figure out their college goals in the 11th and 12th grades.

"I would like to support kids in that process by getting kids to actually plan for college in the 9th grade," he said.

The coursework is also meant to help prepare students for college, as Rodriguez plans to make Socratic seminars and annotations of complex texts central features of the school's classes.

He would like students at ACE to focus more on what they think about their subjects, rather than just listening to what the teacher thinks about them, a practice he maintains happens too frequently at other schools.

"What often happens is that students are lectured at very passively," he said. "What our classrooms have come to look like often is that teachers are just presenting information at kids for 45 minutes and then expecting kids to regurgitate it back at an exam."

Rodriguez stressed that the school is not meant to be particularly showy or ostentatious but will just aim to help students get a good education.

"I’m not so much of a bells and whistles guy, so I’m not really seeking to establish a school program that’s flashy or that has the latest this or that," he said. "Really I’m someone who appreciates doing the basics really well."