Cohort 8 Hollyhock Fellows

Birmingham Community Charter School

We are the Birmingham Patriots! Our team is composed of three teachers: Courtney, Chris, and Leila. Our school is a public charter that serves a wide range of students in the San Fernando Valley. With team members teaching English, History, and Science, we share a dedication to our students and to promoting student voice and choice in the classroom. Students at our school contend with a variety of difficult issues outside the classroom; one goal of ours is to improve on setting realistic expectations for students.  As a team, we would like to be able to integrate what we learn in the program into our classrooms. We are all committed to growing as professional educators, and we also hope to use our influence on various committees, such as the technology and advisory committees, to steer the whole school towards more equitable practices.  Our unique qualities are that we are devoted to improving our pedagogy and working with Title 1 students. We hope to bring a greater sense of equity to our teaching, and we are looking forward to collaborating with fellow educators across the country to deepen our practices.

Cristo Rey San Jose Jesuit High School

Cristo Rey San Jose is a small private school located in the heart of San Jose serving the East Side San Jose community. Our CRSJ team consists of Kenneth (History), Maria (Math), Claudia, and Natalia (both ELA). Three of us have worked together for six years, two of us grew up in East San Jose, one of us also serves as Dean of Instruction, and all of us support, challenge, and keep each other focused on our goal of transformative and liberatory education for our students. Our school serves a low-income population of students who pay minimal tuition to attend due to our Work Study program, in which every student is matched with a corporate or non-profit job site where they work one day a week. Our team collaborates in many different roles at our school besides the classroom and we are eager to bring back what we learn from each other and our Hollyhock cohort to our school community.

Elizabeth Learning Center

This dynamic trio is fully invested in our unique school setting of K-12 Span school with Los Angeles Unified School District. Elizabeth Learning Center is located in the small city of Cudahy, CA. ELC High School participates in two California Partnership Academies, Health Academy and Infotech Academy. These academies provide a school-to-work program that uniquely prepares our students to engage in their prospective careers by preparing them for entry into vocational colleges and universities. Our staff is committed to building community in our school and in our classrooms and we strive to maintain positive rapport and relationships with parents and students. We create opportunities to engage our students in the four Social Emotional Learning Competencies provided by our district, Growth Mindset, Self-Efficacy, Self-Management and Social Awareness. Curating students who are seen wholly. We are the dynamic trio invested, committed, determined as life-long learners to bring our staff and students together in opportunities for learning experiences.

Fremont High School

As a cohort of Social Science and Math teachers, Analydia, Filiberto, Joshua, and Soraya bring a unique combination of critical and analytical thinking to our school community. Fremont High is a comprehensive community high school located in East Oakland, California, in the heart of the Fruitvale community. It has a tradition of strong teacher leaders who work alongside our administrators to create a culturally sustaining school site. We are committed to fighting against the defunding of neighborhood schools and school closures in Oakland, which disproportionately affect families of color. We are seeking to strengthen our resources and expand our toolbox to support our linguistically and culturally diverse students. 

Huntington Park High School

We are proud to represent the Huntington Park High School and STEAM Magnet (HPHS) community at Stanford’s Hollyhock Fellowship! Located in Southeast Los Angeles, HPHS is a comprehensive high school serving a predominantly Latinx, working class community. As educators of color at HPHS, we strive to create a welcoming, rigorous learning environment that supports students to accomplish their aspirations and where they become prepared to be engaged, empathetic members of society. Our team brings to the Hollyhock Fellowship our experiences building close relationships with our students, teaching culturally-relevant content, and implementing mastery learning and grading at our school. Given we are two English teachers (Evangelina and Eva) and two Social Studies teachers (Natalie and Luis), we look forward to the ways Hollyhock will support us in becoming more intentional as we engage in cross-curricular collaboration. We are also excited to reflect with and alongside other teacher colleagues from around the country and to engage with promising practices to improve our teaching! 

James Lick High School

Victor and Jiang teach social studies math/computer science respectively at James Lick High School. James Lick is a title 1 school located in East San Jose where approximately 80% of students qualify for free/reduced lunch and are primarily Hispanic/Latino. Due to these inequalities, our overarching goals as teachers are to build students' reading, writing and arithmetic skills so that they can graduate and become contributing members of society. Both Victor and Jiang are young and full of energy. They stay after school daily to supervise extracurricular activities and are among the only teachers who are always at school for Saturday Academy, where students can make up absences and get extra help with schoolwork. We intend to be at James Lick High School for as long as the district will have us, and so we feel the Hollyhock Fellowship is an invaluable opportunity for us to grow as educators.

Leadership Public Schools

We are a small (but mighty!) team from Leadership Public Schools based in Richmond, California. Even though our job descriptions are very similar, we bring diverse experiences, ideas, and styles to our goal of teaching rigorous, meaningful mathematics. We love student discussions and problem-based learning. We hope that through Hollyhock, we can become part of a broader professional community of educators and find ways to make the hard work of teaching sustainable for the long run. We hope that our lessons from the fellowship will also spread beyond the math department, and help our school provide equitable, joyful learning across disciplines.

Legacy Visual and Performing Arts High School

Legacy Visual and Performing Arts High School is a small, public high school located in South Gate, CA, focused on engaging students both intellectually and artistically. Our students predominantly come from low-income, Latinx, and immigrant households. We imagine a future version of our school where the quality of education we deliver grows exponentially as teachers institutionalize the curriculum and mentorship provided by the Hollyhock Fellowship Program. In doing so, we hope to better support our students holistically and tackle the systemic inequities within our school. We are excited to share the opportunities to integrate the arts into the classroom. For us, the arts have leveraged the importance of student voice and interest in our classrooms.

Renaissance Leadership Academy

East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy is a pilot school belonging to the Esteban E. Torres High School campus in the East Los Angeles Area. Teachers at our school, with an emphasis on Urban Planning and Public Policy and a student population over 90% Latinx, try to build connections between our content subjects and the present and current environments of our students. As STEM teachers, we strive to increase accessibility within our classrooms through culturally responsive teaching practices, recognizing our students’ humanity first, growth mindset fostered by intentional reflection, creating rigorous curriculum while encouraging critical thinking, and assisting students to improve as lifelong learners. We hope through the connections, resources and mentorship during the program, we can provide a learning environment where students are able to develop skills that will help them become lifelong learners and responsible citizens who are able to advocate for themselves and their community.

Tennyson High School

Tennyson High School is located in Hayward, California and serves a diverse community of students, families and teachers. Our team - Paco, Adam, and Ann - are proud to represent our school and continue Tennyson’s participation in the Hollyhock program. While we are from different disciplines - ELD, SPED, and Math - we are unified by our goal for growth for both our students and ourselves as educators, especially in the search for equitable practices that leverage our students’ skills and knowledge to build foundations across disciplines and subjects. We are all excited to implement what we learn through the Hollyhock program and the community built with other teachers on the journey. 

Theodore Roosevelt High School

We - Adriana, Raquel , Melanie, Emily, and Jose Yobani (from left to right) - serve the Boyle Heights community at Roosevelt High School, a Title 1 public school whose student body is 99% Latinx and 97% on free and reduced lunch within Los Angeles Unified. Serving at a campus that has been a historical site of the struggle for educational equity in California soon reaching its centennial, each of the members of this team have equal desires to honor and disrupt tradition. We want to honor the deep standing legacies of resistance, activism, and community that are woven into the cultural foundations of Roosevelt. We also each have visions of disrupting the traditions of structural inequity and white supremacy in our individual disciplines and pathways. Collectively over the past two years, we have worked together to create intentional, responsive, and critical interdisciplinary curriculum, we have emboldened each other to step up and say the unsaid thing in faculty meetings, and we have grounded each other in the increasingly dangerous environment of crisis learning in a global pandemic. Simply put, we trust and believe in each other’s capacity for radical joy, love, and change in the classroom.

Hartford Public High School

Hartford Public High School is the second oldest public high school in the United States. Established in 1638, also known as “The Pub,” we are the home of the Owls and offer various programs to a diverse school population of Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic speakers. These students come from around the world to experience an education rooted in equity and equality. We are a cross-content ELA, Social Studies and Science team. Our team strives to provide a foundation of learning in a culturally aware setting while using student centered practices bolstered by the strong relationships that we build with our students.  We look forward to learning strategies to instill intrinsic motivation in our students through an equity focused lens. 

KIPP Atlanta Collegiate

The 2022 Hollyhock Team from KIPP Atlanta Collegiate (KAC) is a group of educators that represent a cross section of disciplines who are, in the words of James Baldwin, “ready to go for broke” to ensure that our scholars receive a diverse and equitable educational experience at our institution. At KAC, we are “Keeping Atlanta’s Culture” by providing a scholastic journey that exemplifies the culture of this great city. We possess a commitment to create a diverse environment that is accepting and nurturing of all identities. We hold on to this commitment  as we also fight for equity and growth opportunities for all of our stakeholders. KIPP Atlanta Collegiate is a Title I school that predominantly serves students of color. We tirelessly work to ensure that students embrace the excellence within themselves and their culture on a daily basis. Whether scholars are making waves in the science of sound and its cultural connections to their music preferences in Ms. Cooke’s Physics class or uncovering unsung Black History figures whose stories scholars can identify with in AP United States History with Mr. Alexander, our students see themselves.  Whether our scholars are reading ‘coming of age’ texts in Ms. Johnson’s 9th Grade Literature & Composition class that validate and center their intersecting identities and experiences as Black and Brown adolescents, or analyzing Nella Larsen’s book Passing while exploring how race, class, and other societal factors influence people’s actions and different worldviews with Mr. Brown in 10th Grade Literature & Composition our students hear their stories.  Ultimately, we ensure that all of our scholars engage in a rigorous curriculum that places them, their culture, and their identity in the center from the margin. This team is ready to share, as well as gain invaluable knowledge through the Hollyhock experience. 

Juarez Community Academy

Juarez Community Academy is the embodiment of an educational movement that was born out of a need to provide a quality education for students in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, IL. Benito Juarez Community Academy is a Competency Based Learning neighborhood school whose priority is to reform education by establishing a culture of rigorous and meaningful identity exploration and self-advocacy in each student. Our learning community is represented by Diana Guzman-Morales (5th year English IV and College and Career advisor) Cynthia Tobias (2nd year IB / English II), Faith Overall (3rd year teacher of English II and English IV) represent a mix of backgrounds and pedagogical approaches that shed light on how diversity creates opportunity for true collaboration. Our team’s focus on cultural representation, developing student-centered rigorous and compassionate curriculum and a passion for advocacy and exploring student’s intersecting identities to establish intentional social and emotional support, we collaborate to usher forth a true space for self awareness and accountability. We contribute a team of doers in this space, people willing to go above and beyond so that we can create space for our students' potential and their courage to soar high.

Nicholas Senn High School

Representing the Bulldogs, Elisa Williams, Cynthia Austin, and Kevin Ho are proud teachers at Senn High School. Our high school is one of the most diverse within the Chicago Public Schools having over 60 languages spoken within the building. We represent various diverse communities such as being teachers of color, identifying as LGBTQAI+, women in education, and some of us having experience outside of Illinois. Cynthia represents the Science department, Kevin the English and English Language Learners, and Elisa being in the English department. We have a strong passion and drive in serving our underrepresented and underserved students and communities. 76.5% of our students identify as low-income, in addition, 17.9% are English learners. Of around 100+ teachers at our school, less than 20% of the staff are teachers of color and we are proud to represent this group of educators. 
We are beyond ecstatic in being able to connect with other educators and creating a space where all stakeholders feel safe, welcomed, and heard.

Round Lake High School

Hi! Our cohort is from Round Lake: a small suburb North of the diverse and multicultural metropolis that is Chicago–home to the best pizza, the best sports teams, and the best shorelines of Lake Michigan. Round Lake High School is part of an underserved and underrepresented community, but it is filled with innovators, passionate creators, and hard workers. Our goal is to implement an equitable curriculum while maintaining rigorous instruction at our school, and we strive to provide our students with the tools and problem solving skills to be successful within our classrooms and beyond. We are always looking to be more creative in our teaching strategies so we can encourage collaboration and increase confidence among our students. We are excited to collaborate with teachers from around the nation and share our enthusiasm to make a difference, ability to incorporate new methods into our lessons, and openness to discuss successful strategies. We look forward to working together in creating a growth mindset approach when we return to our students. Our names are Ranjana, Chrysee, and Ariana, and we are truly grateful to be the second team at Round Lake to join the Hollyhock Fellowship.

Hiawatha Collegiate High School

We are a team of three teachers from Hiawatha Collegiate High School (HCHS) based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As an equity focused and mission driven public charter school, HCHS offers a personalized high school experience that recognizes and builds talents, while also strengthening students’ study skills and habits to thrive in college. Our Hollyhock School Team consists of three teachers who teach AP Biology, Algebra I, and Composition.  Our goal as teachers is to prioritize culturally relevant practices in our classroom, while facilitating engaging discussions, maintaining high expectations, and centering student identity.  We look forward to learning innovative classroom practices that push our craft in equity-minded ways, while watering the parts of our craft that are already fruitful.

Comp Sci High

Roma, Santoshi, Shilpa, & Ylaiza are four of the STEM teachers at Comp Sci High, a new charter school in The Bronx focused on building technical skills in service of economic freedom. The four of them are passionate about teaching STEM so that it authentically promotes problem-solving while building a strong foundation in Algebra that can serve students for the rest of their academic and professional careers. The goal is to make STEM accessible to ALL learners while making the student feel excited and challenged. They recognize not all students want to pursue STEM past high school but everyone can and should leave high school with better problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. All four teachers also serve as advisors within the school supporting the social, emotional, and post-secondary needs of students – continuously thinking about how to address the needs they see in advisory in their classrooms. 

Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School

Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High school is a social justice oriented, performance based standards consortium high school in the Bronx. This means that our school gets to design curriculum that is not centered around standardized testing and is portfolio-based. Chloe, Aleta, and Paula are all 9th/10th grade teachers who collectively value student-centered learning, making content accessible with the goal of equipping students to be autonomous and independent freethinkers, and we believe in uplifting and centering our community. Our hope for Hollyhock is to create space and time to receive constructive feedback around our teaching practices and then bring back teacher-centered feedback systems to our school. 

Fort Hamilton High School

As teachers at Fort Hamilton High School, we all contend with working at one of the largest schools in New York City. This simple fact has proven to be a double-edged sword: on the one hand, we are provided with a degree of independence and access to resources that are unfathomable to many teachers at smaller schools, however, we may also sometimes feel unseen and unsupported at such a large institution. As such, our goals in attending the Hollyhock Fellowship are to not only join a wider and incredibly supportive community of teachers nationwide but also foster that same feeling of community amongst educators at home. Over the summer we aim to acquire the skills necessary to achieve this goal by sharing our own unique experiences, teaching styles, humor, and collegiality with our fellow teachers within the Hollyhock program. 

Hillcrest High School

We are five teachers at Hillcrest High School. We are all of various subjects, Science, Foreign Language, English, and Special Education. We all are still in the early stages of our career with Mr. Hernandez being the most senior with 4 years of experience and Ms. Xue being a second year teacher. Our main goal for this program is to implement the practices we learn from the program into our own school community as well as enhance our students’ overall learning experiences. The diversity as well as the determination of our team to improve our teaching practices allows us to bring  multitudinous characteristics that will contribute to the program. We are eager about the Hollyhock Fellowship Program and the opportunities to enhance equitable outcomes for all students and to develop our teaching skills for years to come. 

New Visions Charter High School of Advanced Math and Sciences II

We are a group of educators that entered teaching for different reasons, have different teaching experiences, and vary in backgrounds. Regardless, we share a vision to empower our students to maximize their voice in the classroom and create a more equitable learning environment and are excited to learn practices that will support this vision. Our team is dedicated to bringing our students stability and equity in a world that is still mourning and surviving from a pandemic. Rooted in The Bronx, New York- Seema, Yohany, and Ryan are the 4th cohort to have the privilege to be a part of this fellowship from New Visions Charter High School of Advanced Math and Sciences 2- and look forward to being a part of the change that prior cohorts have been able to bring to our school. We are excited to collaborate with teachers who are equally focused on bringing rigor, safety, and equity into their classrooms all while creating a space that values each individual for who they are!

South Bronx Community Charter High School

The South Bronx Community Charter High School Academic Team is described as four influential leaders who believe in holistic equitable education for all students, families, and staff. Through this belief, we engage in culturally responsive education, restorative justice practices, project and competency-based education. Each member of our team contributes unique perspectives and skills that allow us to support our individual teachers in curriculum development and classroom culture. These skills then manifest into our scholars' daily academic progress and school success. Rachael, the 9th-grade academic team lead, is phenomenal at cultivating personal relationships with students and meeting them where they are. Priscilla, the 10th-grade academic team lead, is an expert in individualized learning and support. Christipher, the 11th-grade academic team lead, is masterful in curriculum design and creative outlets for scholars. Nataly, the 12th-grade academic team lead, is skilled at differentiating and scaffolding for all students to develop a truly inclusive learning culture. We emit care and love in order to produce a holistic and equitable education for students who come from the South Bronx, which is systematically one of the poorest congressional districts in the nation.

Sunset Park high School

As the third team from Sunset Park High School to participate in the Hollyhock Fellowship, we are excited to continue this tradition of innovative and equity-focused education. 
We are teachers and leaders who hope to bring ideas and inspiration to our students and the broader school community, through our classes and our teaching teams.
We teach different courses (Trace Roth in English as a New Language, Iliya Smithka in Science, Greg Tull in History, and Humberto Urgiles in Math) but our priorities are the same. In our pedagogy, we strive to center and empower our students, who come from the vibrant neighborhood of Sunset Park and surrounding areas in Brooklyn, New York. Greg and Trace co-teach eleventh grade US History in a bilingual Spanish/English setting, using students’ linguistic backgrounds to leverage their historical knowledge. Iliya and Humberto teach math and science to tenth graders, continuously collaborating within their grade team to support students and improve teaching practices. We all live by the motto that, at SPHS, we are all learners…always! Go heat!

Richard J. Reynolds High School

The three of us are a dedicated team that desires to see students prosper in everything they do. We come from a school that strives to provide a safe, supportive, and arts enriched learning environment that encourages all students to become continuous learners who will graduate as responsible, productive, and creative citizens. As a team, we desire to teach all students to use their knowledge to be creative problem solvers who can engage with the problems of our rapidly changing world. Our team consists of Ella Hill (History), Christie Rybak (Science), and Parker Hunt (English). Together we work primarily with freshman and sophomores. What's really exciting about our team is that when students leave Ella and Parker, they spend the next year with Christie. Because of the continuity between grade levels, we hope to establish a strong base with our students before they move on to higher grades. Our school is full of students with diverse needs. Our goal for the fellowship is to be equipped to reach all of our students effectively, giving them a voice and the confidence to own their learning and their futures.

Northeast High School

We are team Northeast High School from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Our team is comprised of a Science Teacher, English Teacher, and a Social Studies Teacher with a strong background in Special Education. We teach in the largest comprehensive high school in our district, servicing approximately 3500 students. Our school is a melting pot of culture and tradition with students from around the globe who call Northeast their home. We also serve one of the largest Special Education populations in the city. As a team, it is our goal to learn new ways to help make our general curriculum accessible to all students so that they never have to know that our school doesn't have the same resources as our suburban counterparts. We hope through this fellowship to develop our skills as leaders in our classrooms and in our school communities so that we can best serve the greatest students Philadelphia has to offer. 

Cedars International Next Generation

Stephen Carroll is a fourth year life sciences teacher with a passion for the arts. He aims to integrate his passions in the classroom to foster a feeling of genuine community in the classroom that is akin to a friendsgiving dinner table. Stephen Carroll believes community and belonging are essential for classroom and lifelong learning. 

Hans Staats is a sixth year humanities and English language arts teacher. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Stony Brook University. His work focuses on literary and film and media studies. He has published in In Media Res, CineAction, Offscreen, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and various edited collections. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his partner and two children.  

University Prep High School

University Prep High School (The U!) sits within the inner city of the bright and humid San Antonio, Texas, where each day our faculty, students, and families all work in pursuit of an equitable and just education. We as a team come from a background of diverse academic disciplines and believe that education is a holistic process that should be approached with an a cross-disciplinary mindset. We always pursue to build bridges across our different contents to enrich learning as well as making it more accessible to our diverse learners. Each one of us believes that the language, cultural, and personal backgrounds of our students are all strengths in and outside of the classroom. University Prep is majority Latine and reflects the beautiful culture that surrounds us each day in the city. Our team consists of Daniela Ramirez who teaches Science and is from Reynosa, Mexico (the 956 woop!) Kendall Taylor teaches Math and hails from Birmingham, Alabama (the magic city). Jair Oballe teaches History and is from Niskayruna, New York (518 babby!), and Noel Montenegro teaches English and is from El Paso, Texas (the 915!).