Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and “EmberGram”

We’ll offer our target “at-risk” population (low income, socioeconomically underserved youth), with expansive progressive, holistic and global education opportunities that have been widely unavailable to them before now. We’ll nurture and enable students to become social entrepreneurs, engineers and global leaders.

Study Abroad

Ember will offer substantive, guided study abroad experiences to students in 7th and 8th Grade on a bi-annual basis.

Ember’s international experiences will be similar to the private and Gifted and Talented (“G&T”) study abroad opportunities for their privileged peers, with the following differences:

• Ember’s international education experience will be structured around single-sex cohorts, one for boys and one for girls;

• Ember’s international education experience will NOT be a part of a separate school or program, but will instead be a full part of the same Ember public school experience that they receive when they are in Brooklyn;

• Ember’s study abroad experience will be led, guided and conducted by Ember’s fulltime, highly qualified instructional, mental health and operational staff who will travel abroad with students during the entire international educational experience;

• During the international travel experience, Ember students’ core academic learning will mirror the same common core-aligned academic instruction that they receive in Brooklyn; and

• Ember’s upper middle school students will not spend the entire two-year period abroad—they will travel internationally several weeks during both the Fall Semester, and eventually the Spring Semester, for the latter semester returning to Brooklyn in time to take New York State assessments locally.

Ember’s international experience will also mimic boarding school, in that students will receive an additional 49 hours of holistic instructional time per week, including an additional five hours of planned programming each day Monday thru Friday, and an additional 12 hours of planned programming on each Saturday and Sunday. Thus, Ember students will receive even more intensive and immersive instruction in our already strong pedagogy of socio-emotional health, and common core-aligned knowledge and thinking skills, yielding an additional 45% of holistic instructional time per week.

For the high poverty, “at-risk” children Ember will serve, the impact of this portion of our program can literally mean the difference between prison and prosperity. For adolescents in Bedford Stuyvesant-Central Brooklyn, where gang violence is rampant and gang recruitment begins as early as 5th grade, middle school represents one of the most precarious and dangerous periods of young Black and Latino children’s lives. The international education component of Ember’s educational plan will provide students with the kind of transformative middle school experience that is lifesaving. Furthermore, this type of experience is typically only reserved for far more privileged, often wealthy and white, students in private or public selective admission G&T programs.

Ember’s single-sex structure for upper middle school (Grades 7 and 8), and high school (Grades 9-12)

 Single-Sex Upper Middle School

Ember’s single-sex structure for upper middle school (Grades 7 and 8), and high school (Grades 9-12) will build on the success of these well-honed programmatic strategies in three important ways:

• Ember will offer single-sex cohorts for both boys AND girls, giving us an opportunity to not only serve our entire community, but to also strategically expose our students to gender-integrated programming to proactively engage well-documented psycho-social challenges that characterize so much of adolescence, from body image to bullying, sexism to homophobia;

• Ember will combine single-sex schooling strategy and attending to the socio-emotional needs of students with our core practice of developing students’ executive functioning and critical thinking skills, which are proven to lead to increased student achievement; and

• Ember will enhance the impact of both of the above strategies by taking advantage of boarding school conditions during international travel learning experiences that will comprise a significant portion of students’ 7th and 8th grade years, with a community-based boarding school experience during high school.

Boarding school environments provide an opportunity to greatly amplify the impact of otherwise highly effective instructional strategies by reducing external distractions and exposure to negative psycho-social narratives that can impede the development of self-efficacy, agency and growth mindsets.

Get Involved

Apply now

If you would like to enroll your child, please click the Apply Now link below.