Brown Bag—Be the Change: Talk and Book Signing

Fifteen years ago, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education was invited by the Ravenswood Elementary School District to create the first public high school in that community since Ravenswood High School was closed in 1975 due to desegregation. Students were bused out to schools in the neighboring high school district from which most failed to graduate. In the years since, East Palo Alto Academy (EPAA), an innovative charter high school, changed these outcomes. Since 2001, EPAA has served high school students from East Palo Alto and east Menlo Park in a small and caring environment that has led to high levels of student graduation and college success. As documented in a recently published book, Be the Change: Reinventing School for Student Success, a number of school features are responsible for these outcomes, ranging from personalized structures that support students and families to authentic, performance based curriculum and assessments to health and mental health services, coupled with explicit teaching of social and emotional skills.

This SCOPE Brown Bag Lecture highlighted the results of this study, plus experiences and lessons learned by the founding team of EPAA, including Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University; founding principal Nicky Ramos-Beban (PhD ‘13, MA ‘92, BA ‘91); former teacher Rebecca Padnos Altamirano (MA ‘01); and a member of the first EPAA graduating class of 2005, Sonia Jimenez, (MA ‘12), now a high school Spanish teacher at a charter school in San Jose.