School leaders have a greater scope of impact

Thank you all for supporting the New Leaders Giving Tuesday Campaign! Your contributions support Melanie, a principal in New York. With a dual passion for social work and education, Melanie has worked as a counselor in Boston Public Schools and educator in New York City Public Schools, which has given her a unique set of experiences in working with high-need student populations.

Prior to joining New Leaders, Melanie served for four years as a special education instructor in Brooklyn. She entered the education field as a New York City Teaching Fellow and in her first year was able to increase her students’ scores by an average of 25 points in math. As a result, Melanie was ranked in the 93^rd percentile of all first-year teachers in the city. In 2010, she also began training and mentoring other new teachers through various positions with the NYC Teaching Fellows program.

Melanie wants to become a school leader in order to have a greater scope of impact than just the students in a single classroom that she teaches directly. By working as a leader in a high-need school, she hopes to help the students who need it the most and “give back to the communities and cultures that made me who [she is] today.”