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OUR 25-YEAR VIDEO RETROSPECTIVE
As students, teachers and staff head back to the classroom, we
celebrate them all by inviting you to listen to their ideas,
aspirations and accomplishments in this curated collection of short
videos, most of which can be found on our YouTube channel.
These eight shorts are our favorites from the 2012-2013 school year.
This year's top pick is Transforming Schools
& Changing Lives , a 9-minute, 25-year
retrospective film that chronicles our organization's growth and change
since our founding in 1987, while also showing our rock-solid focus on
and commitment to fulfilling our mission of effecting positive and
lasting change in the lives of New York City's young people and their
public schools.
The film was shot and edited over a two-year period, and includes
interviews with dozens of students, teachers, principals, alumni and
staff from across the organization. Special thanks to all those who
agreed to be interviewed and who opened their schools, classrooms and
hearts to us.
If you have never visited our YouTube channel, it
contains 34 videos from the past four years and more are added
regularly. We invite you to visit us there and to subscribe to our
channel, which will insure you receive updates when a new video is
uploaded.
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STUDENT
VIDEO: GALA EMCEE LUIS HERNANDEZ
This year, we had a deep pool of outstanding student speeches and video
interviews from which to select our student video spotlight. In
particular, this year's Gala provided several accomplished and
inspiring speeches, which we will link to for easy viewing below.
But we are highlighting our emcee of this year's 2013 Gala, senior Luis
Hernandez of our Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, who
exhibited a steady-handed calm and confidence on the stage that
was equally matched by talent, insight and depth on the page.
Over the course of the evening he had to improvise often, react to and
play off of the crowd, and keep the night on-schedule and moving
forward. In this video, which captures his first speech of the night,
Luis tells his own personal story and how the community at Brooklyn
School for Collaborative Studies supported him in getting to where he is
today.
This fall, Luis will begin his freshman year at the University of
Southern California on a full-tuition, four-year leadership scholarship
through the Posse Foundation and we wish him all the best.
To hear more great speeches from leaders and scholars like Luis,
click on the following links: Anees Mohammad (Leaders)
introduces Governor Cuomo and talks about his own $40,000/year
scholarship to Skidmore; Gabriela Velez (McCown) presents
ESL teacher Jessica Kruse with our Gaynor McCown Teaching Award and
talks about the history of the award, its namesake, and her own
school's connection to the award; Erika Cabrera (WHEELS) presents
Capital One Bank with our Expeditioner's Award and discusses the Bank's
partnership with her school; and Luis Espinal (Baldwin)
assists with our silent auction and announces his own plans to attend
Lafayette College on a full-tuition, four-year Posse scholarship.
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TV SERIES: PROTECT OUR CHILDREN
In February, WABC's television programming division wanted to hear how
young people were doing post-Sandy, and heard that our "crew
program" was helping students deal with the trauma of the storm.
They visited two of our hardest hit schools, Channel View School for
Research in Far Rockaway and Expeditionary Learning School for
Community Leaders near Coney Island, and talked to crews, principals,
college counselors and individual students affected by the storm.
This half-hour special, which focuses on anxiety and stress in young
people, examines a wide range of issues - and in the final segment of
the show posits that our crew program is an effecitve model that
schools across the City should consider implementing in order to help
students cope with the myriad problems that life throws their way. The
program, which has run annually for more than a decade, has won multiple
Emmy Awards.
Our deep gratitude goes out to Principals Pat Tubridy and David O'Hara,
as well as their dedicated staff and students for making this
multi-hour shoot happen seamlessly during a challenging time. We also
thank them for so capably preparing their students to safely discuss
their own personal and academic experiences with the storm.
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Teacher Video: Jamie Munkatchey on PBS
In this 3-minute segment that originally aired on PBS,
science teacher Jamie Munkatchy of our Validus Preparatory Academy in
the South Bronx shows her students how to transform ordinary liquids
into biofuel: Expeditionary Learning at its best!
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Honoree Video: Governor Cuomo
In a speech that moves from the comic to the wonkish and
ultimately to the inspired, Governor Andrew Cuomo accepts our Educational
Leadership Award at our 2013 Gala and thanks us for our "truly
extraordinary work in the field of education."
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Alumni Video: Sotonye Douglas Leads Pledge Drive
Alumna Sotonye Douglas of our Kurt Hahn Expeditionary
Learning School is one of our organization's first hires for our new
College To-and-Through program. In her new job, she will help mentor
current Hahn students on the college application and college
persistence process. In this video, taken at our 2013 Gala, she
explains the program to our guests, steps them through her own challenges
and successes as a student at SUNY-Albany, and leads our first
fundraising effort to fund the program. As you'll see here, Sotonye's
efforts raised over $25,000 in less than 15 minutes.
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TV News Segment: WABC Covers College March
In December, seniors from all of our network schools
marched their college applications to their local post offices in a
celebratory display of community, perseverance and commitment to their
college aspirations. More than a dozen news outlets covered the march,
but this short segment by WABC's education reporter Art McFarland at
our Channel View School for Research, which had been relocated due to
Hurricane Sandy, is especially effective in capturing the joy of the
day.
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Partnership Video: Capital One Bank
Over the last five years, Capital One Bank has become
one of our largest corporate supporters and has helped drive
educational success at two of our schools - Washington Heights
Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS) and Expeditionary Learning
School for Community Leaders (Leaders). This 4-minute film captures one
of the many ways the Bank has supported WHEELS in particular: by
insuring that the school's first class of graduating seniors' College
Application March was a success. (Click Read More to watch the
film.)
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