What Makes Avenues Soar: Beginning Our 15th School Year

On the morning our faculty and staff returned to campus in August, more than 350 of us gathered to begin Avenues New York’s 15th school year. Before turning our attention to everything ahead, I asked everyone to pause and look back.

Many  members of our current faculty and staff have been part of Avenues since its first school year. Their experience, together with the contributions of the many colleagues who joined along the way, connects the school’s earliest days with the Avenues our students and families know today.

Looking Back at the “First First Day”

My own history at Avenues extends back to before we opened our doors to students. I was here in a hard hat as the school was taking shape and on the first day we welcomed students in 2012. Since joining as a founding middle grades faculty member, I have experienced the school from several perspectives—first in the classroom, later as head of Upper Division, and now as I begin my third year as head of school.

I remember the rush of excitement on that first first day. We weren’t just launching a school year; we were embarking on a unique adventure to see what might be possible if a school allowed itself to think imaginatively and act boldly.

Avenues New York began with 747 students. The idea was ambitious: to create a world-centered education for a rapidly changing world and question familiar assumptions about how school could work. Starting a new school in New York City required considerable trust. Families joined before generations of graduates and decades of traditions existed to validate the vision. Educators came not simply to work at a school, but to help create one.

From the beginning, we did not aspire to be generic. We wanted to be exceptional and a little fearless. We wanted to connect students to the wider world while knowing and caring for them as individuals. We wanted academic rigor to coexist with creativity, curiosity, wellbeing, and joy.

Those aspirations have remained constant even as Avenues has grown beyond what many of us could have imagined. Our community has grown from 747 students in 2012 to nearly 1,870 today. We have also celebrated 11 graduating classes, and our alumni community now numbers nearly 1,000. Some are pursuing degrees at well-chosen post-secondary institutions; others are entering professional life; and our earliest graduates are several years into their careers. Their paths are varied, as we always hoped. We look forward to seeing what they will make of the broad ambitions expressed in our mission—most importantly, to become “architects of lives that transcend the ordinary.”

What Makes This Place Soar

During our colleague gathering, I shared a slide titled “What Makes This Place Soar.” I spoke about our world-centered vision, our trailblazing spirit, and the commitment and creativity of our educators. But I also spoke about music and beauty, warmth, relationships, and gratitude.

Over time, I have come to think of Avenues as a place of both warmth and heft. Our students are known and cared for, and they are also challenged: invited to stretch themselves, engage deeply, and encounter the full life of the world. The relationships they build here give them the confidence to take intellectual and creative risks, wrestle with difficult questions, and discover capacities they may not yet recognize.

Our mission describes Avenues as a special place for faculty and staff to pursue both the science and the art of teaching. Education requires both. It depends on knowledge, disciplined practice, and continual improvement, but it is brought to life through attention, creativity, judgment, and human connection.

That conviction led me to offer our faculty and staff a simple challenge for this year: Know our students well, and make sure that they—and their families—know that we know them.

Knowing a student means recognizing more than academic performance. It means noticing the careful thinker who may not be the first to speak, the student developing confidence or pursuing an unexpected interest, or the contribution that might otherwise go unrecognized. Sometimes that knowledge is conveyed through a substantial conversation; sometimes through a quick note home sharing something a teacher noticed. Small gestures can tell a student something profound: You are seen. You belong here. We recognize who you are becoming.

This work has always mattered, but the human dimension of education feels more urgent than ever as our students grow up amid rapid technological and social change, including the emergence of artificial intelligence. Avenues is engaging seriously with the possibilities and questions these changes present. But no technology can replace the relationships at the heart of meaningful education. If anything, a more technologically saturated world makes it more important that schools remain places where young people are known, challenged, encouraged, and cared for.

Avenues has grown and changed in ways those gathered on the first first day could not have fully imagined. But our central promise remains: to know and care for our students, to challenge them and see possibilities in them, and to prepare them to engage deeply with the world.

That balance of warmth and heft is what has always made Avenues soar.