There's a lot to celebrate right now.

The Class of 2023. Summer. And reflections like these:

"These courses have changed my life, honestly, and have been super impactful in how I'm considering furthering my education." - Agnes Shales (Class of 2023) on Global Leadership, and Climate Science and Social Change

"The Innovation Fund enables us to collaborate on exciting new approaches that really engage students in learning." - Jennifer Spencer, Experiential Physics Teacher

Remarks like these are music to our ears at the BHS Innovation Fund - students and teachers who feel engaged, supported, and inspired to envision new ways of teaching and learning. With generous support from community members like you, this year the Fund invested $335,000 into innovative, teacher-led programs at BHS. Which ones? I'm glad you asked! Here's the list.

Another cause for celebration is the Innovation Fund's 25th anniversary. To date, the Fund has invested over $7 million in more than 30 courses. We look forward to celebrating this rich history of innovation with the BHS and Brookline community over the next year. For now, please save the date for our 25th Anniversary Celebration on Oct. 26, 2023, and contact us if you'd like to sponsor the event or donate to the Fund.

Below are more of this year's highlights and just some of the many other things we're looking forward to next year. We hope you'll join us in building a culture of innovation at BHS!

-Maureen Fallon, Chair, BHS Innovation Fund Board of Directors
Looking back: highlights from the year
Students sharing their experience in Fund classes at board meeting
Student work created in Drawing for Understanding in Field Science and exhibited at the Arnold Arboretum
Teachers and Fund volunteers at the first ever Walk for Innovation
Alumna of the African American and Latino Scholars Program return to BHS to participate in a Fund 25th Anniversary video
One of the chairs created in Engineering Innovation and Design now on display at Walgreens near Pierce
BHS educators - Steph Hunt, Astrid Allen, and Andrew Kimball (left to right) - enjoying the Fund's fall Gala-Rama.
Looking ahead: new and exciting offerings
Summer Summit

This summer, Britt Stevens, Fund Liaison and BHS Curriculum Coordinator for Career and Technology Education, is planning an Innovation Summit for faculty and staff focused on beginnings and endings. Supported by the Fund, the summit will help advance the school's ongoing work re-envisioning students' first and last years at BHS. Rethinking ninth grade and senior year is a priority area for BHS in the next three years. The summit will provide educators an opportunity to brainstorm ideas and eventually turn them into concrete, engaging learning experiences for our students, current and future.
Announcing The Queer Student Program

The Fund is proud to support the creation of The Queer Student Program (QSP), a new addition to BHS designed to support LGBTQ students throughout their experience at the high school. For decades, the student-run club known as the Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA) attempted to fill this role, but as the LGBTQ student body at BHS has grown, it has become increasingly necessary to also expand our support system for this community.

The new Queer Student Program will include:
● Course Offerings - There will be a new Wellness course and a 12th grade elective called The History & Science of Sex and Gender.

● Affinity Programming - Starting next year, there will be a 9th grade Hub/Advisory class specifically for LGBTQ students. We will also launch the OUTstanding Speaker Series in collaboration with other school affinity groups, such as AALSP and LEAP.

The Queer Student Program is the brainchild of teachers Stephen Eesley (Social Studies), Kate Leslie (Social Studies), and Julia Mangan (Science). With Fund support, Stephen, Kate, and Julia worked together with members of the Wellness Department to create programming and course offerings for our LGBTQ students. 
Reimagining Social Justice

We're thrilled to announce that 2022-2023 Innovation Fellow Kiera Flynn-Carson is taking over as lead teacher for the Social Justice Leadership Program. Based on her learning as a Fellow and her experience helping Kate Leslie teach this popular course, Kiera will be integrating a more local element into the curriculum. We're looking forward to seeing her enhancements to an already inspiration course.

As she hands over the course to Kiera, Kate shares these reflections:
"So many kids have said that this class changed the trajectory of their life - truly. It was students in Social Justice that kept in touch with me, and shared stories of the incredible activist work that they were doing in college and beyond... There is no one better than Keira Flynn-Carson to revise and reinvigorate this class and make it fit students' interests and needs post-COVID... I am thrilled that she is excited to teach this class and give Social Justice a new chapter at BHS. She is perfect as the next educator to take on Social Justice."
Continuing Courses

The Fund is pleased to continue supporting these popular and effective courses next year:

● Social Emotional Learning-Tutorial (SEL-T) helps students learn to identify stressors, and develop coping and self-regulation strategies to support academic and social success at school.
● Data Science and Social Justice uses problems related to a variety of social justice topics to analyze data, understand sampling, distinguish correlation from causation, recognize bias, and use probability and modeling to create and support data-based arguments. ​​
● Climate Science and Social Solutions is an interdisciplinary, team-taught senior-year elective with instruction from both the scientific and historical perspectives.
Congratulations

Rethinking Restaurant and Hub/Advisory will now be a permanent part of the BHS culture. They are joining some 30 other programs that the Fund has helped launch, from Experiential Physics to the African American and Latino Scholars Program. Well done!
At the Brookline High School Innovation Fund, our mission is to catalyze innovation at BHS by supporting faculty-driven curricular initiatives that will inspire our students and prepare them to thrive in a changing world.