This past Monday at Flag, the Executive Director of Breakthrough Silicon Valley (BSV), Melissa Johns, shared the exciting news that the Hillbrook community will be recognized at the upcoming, “Are you Smarter than a Breakthrough student?” event on Thursday, October 23 for the extraordinary contributions we have made to the organization.
BSV, a non-profit organization with a dual mission – to launch high potential, underserved middle school students on the path to college and to inspire high school and college students to pursue careers in education – has been a partner organization with Hillbrook for the past five years. The partnership involves hosting BSV at Hillbrook each summer, bringing 100 Middle School students and a dynamic group of high school and college-age teachers to our campus. Several of our teachers have served as mentors and advisors for the program. This past summer, for example, 5th grade science teacher and Makespace Director Christa Flores collaborated with a Breakthrough teacher to bring the world of making and design thinking to a group of 7th grade students.
We also have been fortunate enough to have several extraordinary young people from Breakthrough attend our Middle School, allowing us to extend their experience beyond Breakthrough and into the Hillbrook classrooms. Recent BSV/Hillbrook graduates have gone on to excel at schools including Andover, Thacher, and Notre Dame High School. And this year, for the first time, we have hired a resident teacher — Yanelly De La Rosa – who is both a former Breakthrough student and former Breakthrough teacher. In fact, Yanelly had spent the past few summers teaching on the Hillbrook campus, providing her an opportunity to learn about the school firsthand and inspiring her to apply to and become part of our dynamic cohort of early career teachers.
Our partnership with BSV is one way that our school lives out a critical piece of our vision – to reach beyond ourselves and make a difference in the world. As a school, we are committed to raising young people who want to be change makers, individuals who look at the world around them and strive to make things better. Partnerships like BSV are one way that we as an organization model for the students the importance of engaging with the broader community in an effort to make a difference.
As another example, several of our faculty and staff – 3rd grade teacher Elizabeth Wright, Lower School music teacher Kristin Engineer, 3rd/4th science teacher Jenny Jones, 4th grade teacher and Literacy Coach Kate Ferguson, 6th grade science teacher & CTE Research Designer Ilsa Dohmen, and Director of Technology Bill Selak – were off-campus today participating in EdSummit Los Altos, a conference organized by the Los Altos School District for public and private schools that bills itself as, “A gathering of innovative educators who are interested in pushing the boundaries of learning.” Each of our teachers was invited to participate because they are doing innovative and thought-provoking work that can inspire and inform other educators. They presented on topics that included hacking your learning space, using blogs to support social emotional learning, designing literacy units, curating the world with the Google Cultural Institute, and recreating the Hillbrook sound project, a found object unit integrating art, science, and music. The presence of six Hillbrook educators at this conference testifies to the leading edge work we are doing as a school.
Similar to our partnership with BSV, our participation in events like EdSummit Los Altos affirms our belief that we have an opportunity and obligation to give back to the broader educational community, independent, parochial and public schools. It reflects our belief that in order to be our best, we need to push beyond the confines of our own campus and engage in conversations with other innovative and talented educators from around the Bay Area and beyond. We know that we have a talented team of educators at Hillbrook who have something to share AND we also know that by engaging with the broader community, we will continually challenge ourselves to re-imagine our own practices and ensure we are always making our program better.
Ultimately, the work we do as a school to reach beyond ourselves pays extraordinary dividends here on our own campus. Our partnership with BSV has enriched our community in untold ways, as has our participation in conferences like EdSummit. The benefit can be seen in the lives we influence, the quality of community we create, and the impact it has on our students as we nurture them and help them grow into adults who will be committed to changing the world.
At Hillbrook, we believe it is important to make things better. We are honored that Breakthrough Silicon Valley is publicly recognizing the work we are doing and look forward to celebrating our partnership and the work that we have done together to provide extraordinary educational opportunities for all children.