Comprehensive Educational Plan for 2020-2023

Our School's Mission

The South Bronx Early College Academy Charter School will provide a rigorous and comprehensive liberal arts education to students in the South Bronx through a challenging, New York State (NYS) Common Core/Next Generation standards-aligned curriculum. SBECA will establish a learning environment that emphasizes differentiation and personalization of instruction and a student-centered and fully inclusive approach to teaching and learning. Students will graduate from SBECA prepared for success in college and for active and thoughtful citizenship.

Our Vision is Every Child, Every Day

At SBECA we strive to address the needs of Every Child, Every Day. As a school we believe it is vitally important to know and understand the needs & learning styles of each of our students in order to ensure their academic and social emotional growth. It is our goal to close the opportunity gaps that persist in education. One way we do this is by providing three High School Regents courses in the 8th grade. This high expectation programming ensures our students are ready for the next level. It also opens doors for our students in high schools by creating space in their schedules for Advanced Placement and College Level courses.

We believe in backwards planning, in that regard we envision the student we want to see graduating from SBECA and what we want them to have accomplished and attained. Our students will be high school ready and on a college bound journey, they will have completed High School courses and learned how to build strong relationships. They will have learned about the South Bronx, the world around them and themselves.

The Purpose of this Comprehensive Educational Plan (CEP)

Through our Charter Renewal and New York State Education Department Site Visits and feedback, we have documents that reflect the work that we do and our plan going forward. However, these documents are not always accessible for all stakeholders. Our goal for this instrument is to make the work that we are doing usable and accessible, foster understanding, ensure we are being transparent, and to provide more opportunities for collaboration to occur. We have taken the documents mentioned and created a living document that will be updated regularly and show our plans for the three years of our charter term as well as our progress and adjustments made to help us achieve our goals throughout the journey.

Academic Goals and Programming

Academically we are striving to be the premier school in District 8. In order to achieve this goal, we need to increase the amount of students scoring proficiency on both the NYS ELA and NYS Math assessments. To do so, we use the Engage NY curriculum to inform the sequence of assessed standards teachers will utilize each quarter in order to ensure all relevant standards (as set forth by NYS in their Common Core Learning Standards) are being taught and appropriately paced out throughout the duration of the year as well as revisited to ensure mastery of relevant standards has been attained. Additionally, we employ Understanding by Design (Backwards Planning) to inform teachers’ curriculum development. Teachers are provided with all assessments up front so they can use them to inform their long term vision of planning so it more closely reflects desired student outcomes (i.e. quarterly and yearly goals). Teachers meet regularly to plan cross-curricular units and lessons that are rigorous, engaging, and incorporate elements from their respective grade-level contents (i.e. standards, skills, academic vocabulary terms, conceptual understandings, normed process for written responses, etc.) as well as to individualize instruction to better meet the needs of all students. In addition, ILT teachers communicate regularly with content teachers with the intent of making ILT time more purposeful and effective because it targets foundational skills with which students may be struggling to facilitate their attaining proficiency and/or mastery. In order to provide greater access to daily lessons and better ensure mastery of content for all students, we employ multiple entry points (MEPs) at the outset of each lesson and we align content objectives with language objectives so our language learners have the requisite fundamental vocabulary skills to facilitate their academic development at a pace that more closely matches their peers’.

At the inception of SBECA, we started in the single digits but have improved to 36% proficiency in Math, including Algebra, and 28% proficiency in ELA in 2019. In the document/table below, you will find data that substantiates progress made towards achieving the academic goals we have set forth for our SBECA community as well as our plan to sustain and improve upon said goals. We use the information gleaned from our data findings in order to better serve our students by meeting them “where they are” so we can all rise together. Click here for all of our academic data.

SBECA has added three NYS Regents credit-bearing courses for our 8th Graders: Algebra, Living Environment, and US History. These courses not only push students to new levels of rigor, but they will also assist students who strive to enter advanced placement courses of study in high school (73% of students passed the Algebra Regents Exam and 26% of students passed the US History Regents Exam). Paired with our strong cultural and community building activities, which are integral components in teachers’ daily plans, adding Regents classes for our 8th Grade students facilitates a more seamless transition from middle school to high school, because it helps build confidence that they can be successful in high school classes because they have already completed high school level courses.

Operational & Compliance Goals and Programming

We are striving to exceed in operations and compliance in this charter term. We have looked historically into SBECA’s reporting and data and worked to bring us into compliance with mandated reports. We aspire to hit every deadline without requiring extensions. We want our policies to be transparent, clear and accessible. This instrument, the CEP, is a step in that direction.

We would like our entire teaching staff to be NYS certified by the end of the charter term and have taken steps towards doing so. We want to ensure that every student and their families have what they need to be successful and healthy. We want to increase our levels of support ensuring technology reaches those that need.

Cultural & Relations Goals and Programming

Our school culture is something we take very seriously. Students & Teachers that feel empowered and included can unlock their unlimited potential. It is important for us to include our stakeholders in our decisions, for that reason we regularly survey students, families and staff. Our feedback has been very positive, this is due to listening to our community (NYC doe survey 2019 snapshot below). Though we are meeting this benchmark our goal is to exceed it. We are diving deeper in social justice and identity this charter term. We are learning about our community and our place in the world and how to have empathy and caring towards others and are connect this with our curriculum. We want to increase family involvement, and continue using responsive classroom techniques and logical consequences for behavior.

Links and Information

For ease of access the links below are provided

Our school's website

sbecacs.org

The highlight video below shows some of our cultural strengths and activities

Our Highlight Video

The link below is a compilation of SBECA's historical academic in comparison to state reported information

SBECA Data Garden

NYSED Data Site for SBECA

data.nysed

NYC DOE Data Site for SBECA

data.doe

NYC DOE Survey Results for SBECA

nyc.survey