Our Incredible BBCS 2023-2024 Staff!

We were particularly excited to launch this leadership development work with Principal Cherose Walker at the helm.

Our wonderful Lead Teacher Plus team!

A week later we welcomed new staff for our second annual “new teacher skills bootcamp,” which sounds more intense than necessary! We've added this important structure to our staff development calendar to ensure educators new to Bridge have a foundation in “Bridge Teaching Essentials.”

This summer, we engaged a team of a dozen current staff members to help design and lead portions of this agenda. They developed sessions focused on deepening their new colleagues’ understanding of Bridge students, systems, resources for support, and best practices for building a strong classroom culture.

Our staff orientation was also an opportunity to roll-out several new initiatives this year, including a program called High Res Coaching, which was launched by a few very successful former charter school leaders.

The program articulates a core set of teaching skills and associated PD and coaching protocols to support our Instructional Leadership Team in their efforts to raise the pedagogical bar at Bridge.

77% of our staff expressed enthusiasm for this program by the end or orientation week, and overall we netted an average survey score of 4.02/5 in terms of staff’s overall feelings of readiness for the school year.

With a red carpet, bubble machine, and a high-five line that looked like the start of the Super Bowl, we welcomed our students back to school on August 23rd.

After a few weeks of “staff only” time, everyone was bursting with enthusiasm to see our students arrive on campus!

It's always exciting on the first day of school to see many returning faces. Our deans, numerous leaders, and teachers are back for another year. It was incredible to see so many of our students starting on the first day with trusting relationships in place.

It’s no coincidence that we appear to be off to the strongest start we’ve had in the past three years!

Our classrooms and hallways are purposeful, calm, and productive. Students are buying into our expectations and have already hit the ground running with learning new content.

This summer, we completed and unveiled Jen's Garden in mid-June! With help from Farmer Addy at Green City Growers, we have 8 planting beds with rotating fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs for our staff, students, and families to harvest.

Farmer Addy additionally ran programming for our students this summer to help prepare for this autumn. In their own backyard, our students learned about:

• The importance of worms and their impact on soil health
• Types of pollinators and how to help them with local flowers
• How to properly water, plant, and harvest their own foods