I love urban neighborhoods. I love the people and I love the schools. As an educator, I have spent a large portion of my life trying to help urban communities. Here is my story:

Part 1: My Story

When I was a child, my family moved around a lot. We finally settled in the inner city when I was 10 years old. The neighborhood consisted of multifamily homes, apartments and a lot of people. I loved growing up in an urban community. There was always something going on in the neighborhood–not all of it good–and I was always involved. I remember being chased with a large machete, watching fights in the streets and getting jumped by 10 people. My most vivid memories are of my middle school years, getting in trouble in school and getting in more trouble in the neighborhood. My mother changed her work hours from the day shift to the night shift at the emergency room in order to check on me in school. She also created a “scared straight” type of program with local police to let me know the potential destiny of the path I was choosing to take.

At the end of my senior year in high school, I had nowhere to go to continue my post-secondary education. Nowhere. My dad found a prep school in Massachusetts where I could do a post-graduate year. I did not graduate with my high school classmates; instead, I left in May to work maintenance at the new school. That experience changed my life for the better, but it also left me wondering, why me? Why was I given this opportunity? What about the other kids in my neighborhood? I was so grateful to have this opportunity and I wanted to see other kids like me get the chance. 

This became my purpose in life. I worked in one of the most “urban” neighborhoods in Connecticut. Poverty and violence were prevalent, but I loved the neighborhood. As a teacher, I created a daily morning program for students that started an hour before their school and that reached hundreds of students. I created a basketball team to support the most at-need students in the school. I visited homes. I walked the neighborhoods.

Later, while I was serving as an urban administrator, our school was named a Solution Tree Success Story and a Model PLC school. There are three characteristics that I believe are critical to the successes I have achieved as an educator: living in an urban community, reading everything available and working in an urban community.

Part 2: Start with a Culture of Care

The person who got me into the prep school when I should not have been accepted into the program helped save my life. My most vivid memory of that time and place was the culture of care. Everyone cared about the students and they took action. I went from being a student who did not graduate from high school to the number one student in a prep school. Culture of care. I went on to lead two schools to national PLC Model status and earned national recognition for a summer program. It is all about a culture of care and, as I see it, there are six strategies schools must focus on to create such a culture:

1. Start with the staff–the brilliance in the building
2. Have collaborative conversations on race and equity
3. Be mission-driven
4. Strengthen individual mindsets
5. Conduct home and community visits
6. Create a behavior system focused on relationships

All educators will tell you that they care about students. For most of them, it is the reason they entered the profession, but this cannot be enough anymore. We must take action. We must care enough about students to take action on every practice and policy that has an impact on their learning and equity. 

Part 3: Identifying Resources

The action steps and reproducibles in the book will enable your collaborative teams to begin doing the work immediately. I created reproducibles based on more than 28 years of extensive research and actual in-school use and revision in urban schools. There are 42 documents ready for immediate use. I coach our teams on how to use the tools, the teams use the tools during their collaborative meetings and I collect evidence and offer feedback. While this is going on, I am taking notes to make the forms even better for the next year by reading, researching and revising. The reproducible tools are a key component of this book and cover a wide range of topics. Here are some examples:

1. Learning block plans
2. Common formative assessments
3. Data team plans
4. Instruction
5. Continuous learning in schools

As an educator, I read everything I possibly can to be the best educator I can. Knowledge is power, but knowledge without action is futile.

Learn more about Bo Ryan’s work in his book The Brilliance in the Building, available on Solutiontree.com.