About Us
Not only are we committed to our core values of understanding self, valuing diversity, creating dialogue and taking action, but we also are committed to our mission, our school vision and instructional vision and to antiracism.
Our School Community Goals
95%
Graduation Rate
90%
Attendance Rate
100%
of Student Participation in Work Based Learning & Community Service Activities
Our Mission
We are committed to providing a safe academic environment for all of our students to feel welcomed here at BASE. And we make this possible by…
Recognizing the humanity and power in our students and staff by developing curricula and learning tasks that are meaningful, responsive, and contextualized in the real world, and that prioritize joyful learning through development of identity, skills, intellect, and criticality for all students and all ways of learning.
Embedding opportunities to learn high level problem-solving and life skills across disciplines and in experiences such as internships.
Practicing action-based grading, in which teachers identify for each course a targeted list of core skills and ideas and prioritizes these through practice, feedback and grading; these practices challenge students to understand their own strength and needs, and take ownership of their growth as learners and as people.
Practicing Transformative Justice, which means we are a community where members collectively work to solve problems, take ownership and foster healing. Done authentically, this process builds trust and seeks liberation from oppressive structures that are the root cause of harm.
Committing to antiracist practices across the school, our communities and our society.
Holding all community members accountable for the success of everyone in the community.
Our Vision
BASE is a community of compassionate and critically-engaged learners dedicated to the success of our students in college, as citizens, and as agents of social change.
Joyful, powerful academics, a strong foundation in computer science and software engineering, and integrated work-based learning give all kinds of learners the skills and opportunity to identify and address meaningful challenges in our communities, while preparing them to thrive in their own times - including at college and in their careers.
As a community we work daily toward equity, racial and social justice, and the advancement of our local Bronx communities.
Our Instructional Vision
BASE classrooms are joyful, equitable, anti-racist, strengths-based learning communities. These communities challenge students to take a high level of responsibility for their learning, including understanding their challenges and strengths.
BASE classroom communities challenge students to engage in high-level academic discourse and problem solving so that they can read, write, listen, and speak with expertise across disciplines, and thrive in complex times. Courses, units, and tasks are built around learning targets and challenge students to meet those learning targets using their strengths, including their community cultural wealth. Curricula explicitly address the ways in which academic disciplines can create positive change, and they call on students to challenge the ways in which disciplines contribute to inequity.
Across all disciplines, we do this by:
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Identifying and making transparent to students and families key learning targets for each class and discipline;
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Building units and feedback to students around these learning targets;
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Providing consistent, high quality feedback on students’ growth on these learning targets;
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Ensuring discussion is a central tool of exploration of ideas and problem solving in every class;
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Teaching students explicitly how to engage in discussions, including both development of their own ideas and the ability to listen and integrate the ideas of others.
Our Commitment to Anti-Racism
At BASE and beyond, racism is a toxic institutional sickness that uses systems of power to reinforce policies, practices, relationships, and written and unwritten regulations, resulting in racially inequitable outcomes. Racism diminishes the quality of life for everyone - especially and disproportionately Black people, indigenous people and people of color.
Antir-racism is active work that takes courageous self-interrogation to consciously and purposely address and take action against all forms of racial oppression on the personal, interpersonal, or institutional levels.
Intentionality and awareness are crucial and necessary across all teams and initiatives. Through community relationship-building, setting commitments, and written and unwritten policies, we commit to dismantling racism on the path to liberation by ensuring that all community members can and are encouraged to reimagine relationships and ways of building and implementing anti-racist actions, without retribution.
