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BROOKLYN, NY— Several new schools opened this September in Brooklyn, but none are quite like Ember Charter School’s new high school in DUMBO, which looks and feels like a coworking space full of entrepreneurs.
In fact, the school’s open floor plan, complete with breakout rooms, a snack bar, and a view of the Manhattan skyline, is central to its curriculum and philosophy, Ember’s founder Rafiq Kalam Id-Din told Patch.
“We wanted to really disrupt all the usual things that people think about teenagers, about where they should work and what spaces are for them,” Kalam Id-Din said.
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Funded by government grants and donors like Bloomberg Philanthropies, Ember Charter School is a free public charter school based in Bed-Stuy that prides itself on creating a holistic learning environment and helping students become leaders in their fields.
In keeping with this ideology, the school doesn’t refer to its more than 90 high schoolers as “students” but as “entrepreneurs” designing their careers.
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But it’s not just a different title — all the students take economics and business courses, some offered through a partnership with St. Johns University, and are encouraged to create innovative careers for themselves.
“I know that I’m going to be an entrepreneur,” 10th grader Sahana Gadson told Patch. Gadson is an illustrator interested in helping artists gain viral success by mastering social media algorithms.
“Though I’m not sure what exact problem my business will solve yet, I know that I want to hire only people of color,” Gadson said.
The plan for Ember’s high school has been in the works for quite a while. Kalam Id-Din has been working to get the entrepreneurial high school model approved by city regulators for some time, and it finally got approved in 2020, he told Patch.
It opened in August 2020 inside Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy, before moving into its new home in DUMBO this fall.
Kalam Id-Din said that this year, around 65 percent of the students expressed interest in working in the arts and entertainment, so his foundational math courses will be taught using real-life applications in the entertainment industry.
Other classes this year include “Money, Power and Control: Principles of Economics” and “Reading and Writing the Black Radical Imagination.”
Though the school is open to anybody, 90 percent of the student body comes from a low-income background, and 99 percent of the students are Black or Latin American, Kalam Id-Din said.
“We wanted to create a place that will serve those who have the least resources and the least opportunities and give them the most,” Kalam Id-Din said.
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