Academic Leadership Community

Introduction: Academic Leadership Community (ALC) is located within the Pico Union community in downtown Los Angeles, which is one of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States. The community is home to over 350,000 people, primarily immigrants from Mexico and Central America. ALC is a pilot high school located on the campus of Miguel Contreras Learning Complex (MCLC). ALC currently serves about 450 students, all of whom are English Learners. As classroom teachers, we strive for content mastery and to build grit and resiliency in our students. We also work on developing universal skills that are transferable across content such as literacy and numeracy. Since we come from a small school, we are the only providers of our content areas, so we are coming with a motivation to learn from our fellow teachers.  We also represent the spectrum of beginning teachers (two 3rd year teachers) to more advanced (7 years teaching). At a small school we wear many hats and represent the content areas of math, science, economics, AVID, and leadership. We are all devoted to our students both in and out of school hours supporting many extracurricular activities such as track & field, ASB, and Oakgrove.