Welcome Back - Bank Street College of Education

Dear Colleagues, Families, Students, Alumni, and Trustees,

I hope you had a relaxing summer. I am excited to welcome you back as we launch the 2015-16 school year.

As many of you know, the coming year marks Bank Street’s 100th anniversary and we will have several opportunities to celebrate, commemorate, and learn together to mark the Centennial. I hope you will join us for as many of them as possible.

In an exciting start to our 100th year, I am pleased to announce that—through the generosity of longtime trustee Lynn Straus—we are establishing the Straus Center for Young Children and Families at Bank Street College of Education. The work of the Straus Center will focus on young children from birth to eight years of age. It will make a powerful, research-based case for child-centered supports and progressive practice in the early years, not only in classrooms but across all settings where young children and their families live and learn. This new Center, which emerged as a central goal from our strategic planning process last year, will inform education policy now and for decades to come—extending Bank Street’s impact, influence, and visibility. It will also revive Bank Street’s strong tradition of research that is grounded in the practice of work with young children. The Straus Center will be developed within the Division of Innovation, Policy, and Research and will draw on the deep knowledge and experience of faculty in both the Graduate School and Children’s Programs. To celebrate the launch of this important initiative, we will be hosting an event on Monday, September 21, that will feature a keynote from New York University professor Lawrence Aber, an expert in child development and social policy, and an alumni panel discussion moderated by Graduate School faculty member Virginia Casper.
A few weeks later, on Friday, October 16, the Trustees will host my formal inauguration as President of Bank Street College. The ceremony will start at 4 p.m. in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and will feature a keynote address by renowned educator and thinker Linda Darling-Hammond. I will also speak and share my vision for Bank Street as we move into our second century and work to engage more deeply with schools and educators across the country. The inauguration is open to everyone in our extended community and will be a fun and thought-provoking celebration of Bank Street that will conclude with delicious food and drink at a reception in the cathedral. I hope you will be able to join us. Please let us know if you can attend, and feel free to invite colleagues and friends.
The inauguration ceremony will begin a weekend of Centennial activities at Bank Street. On Saturday, we will hold our Inaugural Symposium—“The Schools We Want.” The Symposium will be a day of exploration and conversation, beginning with a panel discussion addressing urgent questions around identity, integrity, and social justice. For the rest of the day, faculty, alumni, and visiting scholars will offer workshops on a broad range of related topics, including opportunities for discussion, hands-on activities, music, a museum visit, and reflection on the enduring values that infuse our work.
The weekend will culminate with a special Centennial Fall Fair on Sunday, which will provide more opportunities to play and learn and is always a highlight of the year for children and their families in our School for Children.

There will be additional Centennial programming throughout the year, including lectures, exhibits, discussions, and celebrations. We will be launching a quarterly newsletter for the Bank Street community and a website dedicated to our Centennial in an effort to keep everyone informed as the year unfolds. If you want to get involved with the planning or are interested in volunteering at any of the Centennial events, we need all the help we can get. Please email Linda Reing, Director of Alumni Programs, at lreing@bankstreet.edu.

This year, my wife Cynthia and I are also looking forward to continuing the book discussions we began last fall. I believe that this year’s selection—How Children Succeed by Paul Tough—will prove equally stimulating and we invite all who are interested in joining us to sign up for a discussion date: September 29, October 20, or November 5. Copies of the book will be available for sale in the Bank Street Book Store starting next week. In many ways, Tough’s popular book speaks directly to much of the work we do by providing a clear and engaging synthesis of research on how children learn and develop across a number of disciplines, including psychology, economics, and neuroscience. Tough tells his story through a series of case studies describing child and youth development work underway in high-need communities around the country. His book has stimulated a new focus among educators, policymakers, and funders on the importance of social and emotional learning, which will generate new opportunities for Bank Street as we work to broaden our impact.

Although the start of the school year always feels like a new beginning, as many of you know, it has been a busy summer at Bank Street as well. The Graduate School, Summer Camp, Family Center, Bank Street Head Start, and Liberty LEADS were hard at work all summer supporting students and their families, while other teams focused on planning and launching new initiatives that will begin this fall.

The Summer Camp expanded to include both a new site in Brooklyn and an extension program in August that was a partnership with Columbia University and The Cathedral School. Our campers had the opportunity to study Spanish, learn to swim, write and perform an original musical, create special effects for their own films, and explore new places on field trips throughout the City and beyond.
The School for Children has begun recruiting for next year’s class of incoming students, which will be larger by about 14 students as part of our efforts to both reduce class size and bring new resources into the school. We also recently completed the school’s Endowment Campaign, Securing a Progressive Future, successfully raising $7.7 million in gifts and pledges. Compared to 2011, this will quadruple the school’s endowment once all pledges are in. This endowment will exist in perpetuity and continue to grow, providing a new annual revenue stream that will strengthen the school and support our students, families, and teachers.
The Graduate School, under the leadership of our new dean, Cecelia Traugh, is beginning a series of conversations about what social justice means in the context of our work, while at the same time launching several new programs that will enable us to expand the number of students we enroll. Starting this fall, BronxWorks, a human service organization, and settlement house will serve as the off-site campus for seventeen early childhood teachers who are part of the three-year Early Childhood Urban Education Initiative. Many of these teachers will be first generation master’s students. We are also launching a partnership with Purchase College, SUNY for current undergraduate students who are interested in completing a master’s degree during the fifth year at Bank Street. Finally, we’ve begun the work proposed in the strategic plan to expand our degree offerings in ESL and special education.
As also envisioned in our strategic plan, our Division of Innovation, Policy, and Research is poised to launch a policy initiative aimed at securing sustainable public funding for high-quality teacher preparation programs nationwide. Our belief is that much of the current obsession with accountability for teacher education has missed the core fact that there is no way to fund or expand high-quality programs, like teacher residencies. Good teacher education programs form close partnerships with districts and schools and provide extended, hands-on training guided by expert practitioner-educators. We will work to build a coalition of teacher training programs, school districts, and states interested in pushing to solve this problem and hope to be part of piloting some new models in the coming years.
Our professional development team has significantly expanded our work with the New York City Department of Education as part of the City’s historic pre-K initiative. This summer and throughout the next school year, 3,000 teachers and assistant teachers will engage in professional development (PD) sessions and in-class coaching throughout the school year focused on social and emotional development, while an additional 1,500 teachers and assistant teachers will learn to integrate the Building Blocks math curriculum in their classes. For the first time this year, school leaders and center directors will also be involved in PD sessions and actively engaged in coaching site visits. To prepare for this work, we hired and trained over 25 full-time coaches and more than 100 facilitators, drawing from Bank Street faculty and our talented alumni network. This investment by the Department of Education in both sustained coaching for teachers and PD for school leaders is a very promising development for teachers across the City and will strengthen the quality of learning experiences for thousands of children.
Finally, many of you may have noticed physical changes around the building. The Physical Plant Services team has been active this summer making sure we are ready for the start of school. The revamped play deck on the second floor features a new floor and the Family Center has, among other improvements, beautiful new cubbies and a new parking station for strollers. We will be holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new play deck on the morning of Wednesday, October 7 at 9 a.m. Please save the date.

Finally, we have begun to receive proposals for the Centennial Innovation Fund, which, as many of you know, was developed to foster learning and collaboration across the College. If you are a Bank Street staff or faculty member interested in submitting a proposal for a new project, an initial draft of the application is due on September 30. Even if you’re not interested in submitting, we are still looking for application readers and I encourage you to volunteer.

If you made it to the end of this letter, you realize just how much we are taking on. And, as long as this letter is, it certainly doesn’t capture everything that is happening across the College. I’m excited about these ambitious goals and look forward to working together as a community to bring them to life over the course of this year.

Best,
Shael