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Students Find Home at Discovery High School

By ALEX KRATZ

Despite all of his best efforts, Discovery High School Principal Scott Goldner can’t stop his students from calling him by his first name.

“He tried,” says Ashley Cameron, a senior who lives just a couple of blocks away from the small school located inside the Walton HS campus near Kingsbridge Road. “But it just didn’t work. He’s Scott.”

That may be the only thing not working for Goldner as his burgeoning institution heads toward the end of its fourth year, which will culminate in June with Discovery’s first graduation ceremony.

Judging by the results of its first-ever School Quality Review (the SQR, as it’s referred to, is an all-encompassing review that the city’s new Empowerment schools must undergo each year) in late February and a recent visit to the school a few weeks ago, Goldner’s Discovery is not simply working, it’s thriving.

“The SQR was a great affirmation of our growth, our success and our goal of continuous improvement,” Goldner said in an e-mail last week.

Even the principal’s failure to make his students address him formally speaks to the familial and community atmosphere that Goldner’s administration and faculty have fostered at Discovery.

“Everybody knows everybody,” says Nigel Shoulders, a charismatic senior who, like many Discovery students, doesn’t so much speak about the school but gushes about it. “Everybody’s got everybody’s back,” he says.

And it’s not just the students doing all the gushing. The man who conducted the SQR, an independent reviewer hired by the Department of Education (DOE), had nothing but good things to say about Discovery based on a Power Point presentation he created after his review, which included a two-day visit.

“The school provides a warm, pleasant and safe environment which is highly conducive to learning,” the reviewer wrote in his presentation. “Teachers know, understand and respond extremely positively to being accountable for the effectiveness of students’ learning.”

The high praise led Joel T. DiBartolomeo, Discovery’s Network Leader, to rank the school in the DOE’s top 20 percent. “Such a statement is easily verifiable, particularly when one reads the entire Discovery report and could arguably be much higher when one is on the ground making direct judgments as I do,” DiBartolomeo said in a letter to Goldner after the review.

Goldner first “proposed” Discovery – “Teaching and Learning Through Creative Discovery” is the school’s tagline and mantra – to the DOE in 2001. It was approved in 2002 and opened on the Walton campus in 2003.

Even before it officially opened its doors to students, Discovery was on the road to success.

Cameron remembers meeting Goldner at a high school fair when she was an eighth grader. The next time she saw him, Goldner not only remembered her first and last name, but also her mother’s first and last name, which is different than Cameron’s.

“I already felt comfortable at a school that didn’t even exist,” Cameron says now, four years later.

Discovery has since grown from a transient handful of classrooms inside Walton to a full-fledged high school with a permanent home that now encompasses the building’s entire second floor.

Senior Erick Melo attended the brand new school during his (and the school’s) freshman year. He then moved to Georgia for his sophomore and junior years before returning to the Bronx and Discovery this year.

Not only were there more students and teachers as well as improved classrooms and facilities, but “everybody was coordinating together,” Melo says. “It was more like an actual school.”

And not just any actual school. As a small Empowerment school, Goldner and new Assistant Principal Rolando Rivera (“Rivera” to all the kids) say they have the autonomy and flexibility to tailor programs and curriculum to the needs of their students. A “voracious” reader, Rivera has a small library full of education material in his office. He conducts all of the faculty’s professional development training by himself so he can make sure the administration and teachers are all on the same page when it comes to assessing student performance and progress and then implementing changes.

Another key component to Discovery’s success is the school’s various partnerships with outside organizations, such as MMC Theatre in Manhattan and the Lehman College Art Gallery, which allows students to get invaluable experience outside of the classroom.

David Laster, a 20-year-old senior who will be graduating in four years, called his Lehman Art Gallery internship, pure “awesomeness.”

Goldner and Rivera are already passing out save-the-date cards for Discovery’s graduation ceremony in June.

For many of the seniors, the day will be bittersweet. Many of them are going on to college reluctantly. Senior Cynia Barwell, a 16-year-old Bronx beauty queen will be going to Colby College on a full scholarship. Shoulders is heading to Bennington College to study Japanese and culinary arts. Laster will be attending Monroe College at its New Rochelle campus. And Cameron is going on to Albright College in Pennsylvania.

“As seniors, we’ve gone from the ground to the sky and the sky’s the limit,” Cameron says.

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