Welcome
Hello and welcome to our third year! As I have said time and time again, I feel blessed to continue this journey to excellence with you, your children and the wonderful faculty we have brought together here at East New York Prep. Your support and involvement have been so instrumental in our success during our first two years, and it will be equally, if not more, critical going forward.As you all know, we opened the doors to East New York Prep two years ago with one very concrete goal - to offer children an elementary education that will put them on the road to college and, beyond that, to successful and happy lives. But as you well know, for a lot of children in communities like East New York and Brownsville, that's not always such an easy thing to accomplish, and it is certainly nothing that we as parents and educators can take for granted.
A lot of people outside of this community don't think so highly of it, and that's not too surprising if you look at how we are portrayed in the media. I don't know if you saw this, but last fall the Village Voice had an article about East New York that called this community "the best place to get murdered, raped, or robbed" in New York City.
And then there are the statistics. East New York is a community where more than 70% of children are born into poverty, where fewer than 40% graduate from high school and where fewer than 10% go on to college. In East New York nearly 80% of public school students read below grade level. The public schools haven't done right by you and your children, and as a result, in too many schools in our community, children are not being prepared for higher education.
But these attitudes and perceptions and statistics don't begin to tell the real story of this community and its enormous potential. I understand that parents from East New York want the very best for their children, but don't always have to tools and resources to make that happen. That's where you stepped up.
It was you, the parent, who took the first step demanding better educational alternatives in this community, and later took the initiative to submit your child's name for our lottery, and ultimately, elected to trust us with your children's education, a trust that we take seriously.
But yours is not blind faith. So while you trust us to educate your children, you also know that for your children to succeed it's up to you to hold us accountable and as importantly, it's up to you to participate. And you've done that.
We take your input, concerns and ideas very seriously, and if you look around the school, you can see everywhere how your ideas are put into action. A couple of quick examples: It was a parent, for instance, who gave us the idea to name our classes after colleges. It was another parent who selected our uniforms. And of course, we'll never forget this time last year, how our parents organized themselves and how hard you worked to help our faculty set up our classrooms and school to prepare for the rigorous school year ahead.
We don't take these things for granted. Things like parents preparing food for school events, or coming out to the different events, and supporting your children and one another. As I look forward to our third year, parent involvement will become more important. And particularly the involvement of our third grade parents, because you have established yourselves as leaders among East New York Prep parents.
A school, like any other organization or institution, can struggle with growth in the absence of leadership. This year, we've added another class, another 50 students. To the parents of our newly admitted kindergarten students I welcome you to East New York Prep and to the "ENYP Way." To our returning families, I'm asking for your help to acclimate our new families, because these students and their parents won't know the "ENYP Way." They don't yet know what it means to be part of a Tolerant, Hardworking community of Integrity that makes No excuses for both acquiring and imparting Knowledge.
And as you know, "The ENYP Way" is to THINK about the details, the little things, or at least the things that seem little. We know that if children and parents pay attention to those small details the big picture will come into focus the way we want it to. So things like sending children to school in their uniform - not a partial uniform but a complete one, or being on time to school in the morning for the THINK-circle, or coming to school prepared to learn everyday.
I will need your help in really letting our new arrivals know that what we are striving for, and what we are determined to maintain is a culture of excellence, and you can't have a culture of excellence if we don't have the highest expectations of ourselves and of one another, or if we allow "little" things to slide. We look at a lot of our failing public schools, the schools you opted not to put your children in, and we can see what happens when you don't sweat the details. Am I right?
At ENYP we set the bar high - for our students and for our parents -- and time after time, you rise to the challenge. We know that children will meet or exceed whatever expectations we adults set for them so long as they have the support to do so, and the most crucial support anyone can give to a child is his or her parents' involvement in their education. So please begin to mark your calendars prepare for the many events we will engage in together at East New York Prep. This year we will continue in the tradition of offering an array of activities to be involved in- from Class Parents to PARP (Parents as Reading Partners) to Family Fridays and Yoga and Me courses. Simply put, there will be no shortage of ways to be involved and support ENYP.
As always, I look forward to seeing you throughout the hallways of ENYP and thank you for your continued implementation of the ENYP Way!
Kindly,
Sheila Joseph, Esq.
Head of school