“On The Rise: Designing a 9th grade experiential curriculum that emphasizes socio-emotional learning and executive functioning skills to support college preparedness.

Sandy Manessis • Cahn Fellow 2019

The Bronx either makes you or it breaks you. This is the reality that our school faces every September when a new cohort of freshmen step inside our building. Not even a decade old, New Visions Charter High School for Advanced Math and Science II (shortened to AMS II) is a relatively new school in the poorest borough in NYC, but we have simultaneously obtained impressive achievement marks while positively impacting the lives of hundreds of low-income young students who could have ended up as “just another statistic”. We welcome students into our AMS II family and provide them with a rigorous and engaging educational experience that exposes them to a world outside their borough and cultivates a metamorphosis within them, transforming these boys and girls into lifelong learners, responsible citizens, and productive members of our global community.

In our project, we focused on how we can design a 9th-grade experiential curriculum that emphasizes socio-emotional learning and executive functioning skills to support college preparedness. After a series of trial and error, we came to the determination that we would have to focus on a subgroup of 9th Grade who had high attendance, but were not achieving and maintaining competitive GPAs. Historically, 60-63% of our 9th Graders as a whole end their first year with an 80+ GPA. Our goal was to see this percentage increase by providing targeted supports, resources, and lessons solely focused on socio-emotional learning and executive functioning skills to our subgroup of students through an enrichment program, which became known as On the Rise.