The Bridge to Brilliance: How One Woman and One Community Are Inspiring the World, Paperback

Descriere

Be inspired by the magnetic young principal who ``stands on the front line of the fight to educate America's children.`` (Brandon Stanton, author of Humans of New York ) and the book that Essence calls ``Essential reading.`` In 2010, Nadia Lopez started her middle-grade public school, Mott Hall Bridges Academy, in one of America's poorest communities, in a record heat wave--and crime wave. Everything was an uphill battle--to get the school approved, to recruit faculty and students, to solve a million new problems every day, from violent crime to vanishing supplies--but Lopez was determined to break the downward spiral that had trapped too many inner-city children. The lessons came fast: unengaged teachers, wayward students, and the educational system itself, rarely in tune with the already disadvantaged and underprepared. Things were at a low ebb for everyone when one of her students told a photographer that his principal, ``Ms. Lopez,`` was the person who most influenced his life. The posting on Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York site was the pebble that started a lucky landslide for Lopez and her team. Lopez found herself in the national spotlight and headed for a meeting with President Obama, as well as the beneficiary of a million-dollar campaign for the school, to fund her next dream: a field trip for her students to visit another school--Harvard. The Bridge to Brilliance is a book filled with common sense and caring that will carry her message to communities and classrooms far from Brooklyn. As she says, modestly, ``There are hundreds of Ms. Lopezes around this country doing good work for kids. This honors all of them.`` From the Hardcover edition.