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Article courtesy of The Black Voice News.
For more stories, visit Black Voice News online.
By BVN Staff --
Excitement and anticipation was in the air Tuesday evening, when a standing room crowd converged on the San Bernardino Unified School District Board meeting to witness the initial charter petition presentation for Hardy Brown College Prep, a charter school planned for the Inland Empire.
The school, named for community pioneer, former SB Unified School Board president and publisher of the Black Voice News Hardy L. Brown, Sr., is a partnership between Project Pipeline of Sacramento and The Black Voice Foundation. If approved, the school will open on San Bernardino’s Westside in fall 2010.
The school, inspired by Brown’s legacy and modeled after the successful St. Hope PS7 charter school in Sacramento, will be designed to close the achievement gap with a mission to graduate high-achieving students prepared for college and citizenship in a democratic society. The board now has 30 days to vote on the charter petition. I can tell the importance of this item by the sea of green in the audience,” SBUSD Superintendent Dr. Arturo Delgado said before the 30 minute presentation in reference to the hundreds in the audience wearing green “Hardy Brown College Prep” tshirts in support of the charter petition and what it represents to a community struggling to close the achievement gap that has led to underemployment, high school drop-outs, and one of the lowest college-going rates in the state.
The school board meeting last night was inspiring. One young man came to me and said it inspired him to go back to school. I thought he was talking about college or just dropped out recently. He was 25 years old, he said he would have graduated in 2002 but he quit. This is bigger than a charter school, it opened up opportunity to see how we can work together inter-generationally on other issues in our community,” Dina Walker said after the board meeting.
Walker and her brother Dr. Daniel Walker are both members of the school’s design team and active education leaders in the region. It is the Brown legacy we are living,” she said.
In attendance at the meeting in support of the petition was a cross section of the community including students, football coaches, longtime educators, parents, grandparents, and elected officials. Among the supporters was Assemblymember Wilmer Amina Carter, “it was so wonderful! The presentation was so well put together. I almost cried when I heard only 7% of students in San Bernardino passed Algebra. There are many good things happening in the area and this is one of them.”
After the presentation, school board vice president Danny Tillman remarked that the Hardy Brown College Prep charter petition presentation was the best he had ever seen. Hardy Brown, who served as an elected trustee for the SBUSD for twelve years, was nostalgic as he spoke of his time on the school board and asked for approval of the charter school.
The school will provide rigorous standards-based curriculum and feature research-based instructional practices that yield results with low-performing students and will encourage parent involvement and advocacy. The school will open with K-3 and 6th grades for a total of 235 students.
It will add a grade a year until 12th grade. Joining Project Pipeline and Black Voice Foundation as school partners and design team members are Concerned African American Parents Alliance, BLU Educational Foundation, and LADIES.
Dr. Daniel Walker summed up the meaning the school has in the community, "This represents the unbounded potential of our youth and limitless expanse of the parents’ love and commitment to their children."
For more information on the school, please contact the school’s community engagement and outreach director Dina Walker at 909.820.2827 or dinalwalker@ gmail.com.
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