Summer 2019
ESPI: City Smart Scholars Newsletter
Dear ESPI Friends,
Cheers from summer with our ESPI: City Smart Scholars! By providing demanding academics to some of the city’s brightest students from low income and racially isolated neighborhoods and schools, we are making a huge difference in young peoples' lives. We are so grateful for your support; without it our young program could not exist. With your ongoing assistance our work can continue and grow far into the future. Thank you!
Best regards,
Vizhier
Vizhier Corpuz Mooney, ESPI President and Chair of Development
ESPI: Summer 2019 Program
Our fourth year of summer classes served approximately 75 students in three grades, rising 6 th , 7 th and 8 th , aided by over 40 staff, faculty, college interns and volunteer high school mentors. We continue to improve our program, modeling the focus, cheerfulness, generosity and engagement that we expect from our young scholars. 

Our group of 32 rising 6th grade Scholars continue their work from last spring with a focus on creative writing, reading comprehension and math, developing their skills in factoring, exponents, elementary algebra, and the more sophisticated problem solving expected by New York’s exam schools. After spending one week focused on creative writing at the acclaimed Writopia Lab, the sixth graders were diving deeper into their creative writing skills, working on finding detail, narrative and drama in the world around them as they learned the structure of personal essay writing. 

Our 22 rising 7th grade Scholars spent weeks immersed in conceptual math and fiction and non-fiction reading and writing analysis. Readings included George Orwell’s Animal Farm , Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food , and essays and articles taken from publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic . Students further exercised critical thinking skills in our popular and spirited Debate Prep class run by award winning debate students Shaye Martin and Drake Roth.
Lastly, our 8th grade Scholars are on a serious run to prepare for the upcoming SHSAT this fall. Their studies included extensive test prep, with a focus on reading comprehension and math. All of our students participate in mindfulness training to provide them the tools to maneuver through everyday pressures.
Fridays are for Field Trips
ESPI Field Trips were a packed schedule of journeys to museums, a dance school, an outdoor art park and the wilderness!
We visited:
  • The Museum of the City of New York to study Activist New York
  • The National Dance Institute to see a behind the scenes rehearsal
  • Storm King Art Park to wonder at the beauty natural and sculptural
  • The American Museum of Natural History to explore biodiversity
  • The New York Historical Society to learn about the Immigrant City
  • 2nd Circuit Court of New York for a tour and a peek behind the scenes
  • The Museum of the American Indian to learn about Native /Indigenous peoples
  • Wild Earth Into the Woods Adventure Day
2019 MIDYEAR REPORT BY FOUNDER AND PROGRAM CHAIR, ANDY MCCORD
This year, we are excited to see our first full cohort of students enter 9 th grade in September. We have worked with 56 students, most starting as 5 th graders in 2016. The overall rate of success for these students on the Specialized High School Admissions Test was 29 percent. For students completing at least two terms of work with ESPI the offer rate was 46 percent. For those whose ongoing work with us included specific test preparation for the SHSAT the rate was 57 percent. Our students, including some who turned down offers from specialized high schools, were also admitted to highly selective private and parochial schools (Trinity, Cardinal Spellman) where they are receiving full scholarships, as well as highly selective public "screened" schools (Bard, Beacon, Columbia Secondary, LaGuardia).
We are particularly pleased that two of the three City Smart Scholars who will be going to the Bronx High School of Science are actually from the Bronx!
We are encouraged by these first-time results in high school admissions, and we will work all the harder with our younger students to keep them in the program. Attrition in the form of departures to top flight programs such as Prep for Prep, TEAK Fellowship or Oliver Scholars (or the students who “leave us early” to attend Hunter College High School) is not an issue: these students leave with our blessings and, often, recommendations. We are also very happy when students participate in part-time programs like Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, further work on scholarships at Writopia Lab or the Center for Talented Youth and then return to us. For other students, though, we hope year-round programs will keep them together once they commit to City Smart Scholars in 5 th grade. 
An interesting comparison...
If all of our “two-term” City Smart Scholars had been in a single middle school, that school would be the 13 th best “feeder school” by percentage to the specialized high schools, tied with Mark Twain I.S. 239 School for the Gifted & Talented at 46 percent. Ninety-two percent of our rising 9 th graders are Black or Latinx. Enrollment at Mark Twain is 13 percent Black and Latinx. We want to improve these results. The outcomes for 6 th grade students who took the Hunter College High School test this past winter give us a sign that we are on the right track: four out of 17 students we worked with in advance of this test were accepted into the school, versus one per year in the previous two years .
The beginnings of an alumni program…
Most urgently, we are excited to develop a program of support for our students in high school. We will be launching Saturday “office hours” for these students, where they can come in to link up with mentors, tell tales of their new challenges and be offered guidance on how to make use of academic and personal support systems that are available to them at their schools as well as with us. New York’s academically demanding public schools are “if you can make it there you can make it anywhere” kinds of places. We hope to have a light touch in supporting our students. We will recruit them to leadership roles as high school “near-peer mentors” working with new City Smart Scholars, as well plug in to a broader world of extracurricular challenges, through programs like those at the Center for Talented Youth. We want them to know that we are here to support their success, but also to succeed on their own initiative. 
The real proof of our programs will lie in student success in high school and beyond. We do know that every year there are plenty of high-achieving students who would benefit from our programs. There are at least 3,000 Black and Latinx students entering high school this September with records exceeding grade level in their middle school years; such profiles would normally predict admission to and success at a specialized high school for students from other communities.
ESPI WELCOMES TWO NEW MEMBERS
Francesca Bacon , formerly a long time liaison to the Campus Schools at the Hunter College Foundation joins us as our new Operations Director. A transplant to New York from London, Francesca worked as an Art Director and Production Designer in commercial print, television and video for many years prior to her involvement in schools. Raising her children in New York piqued an interest in public educational communities in the city, from Class Rep, to PTA president and Hunter College liaison. Francesca has been a three time TEDx producer, and past board member of Art & Remembrance, an organization devoted to Holocaust education.
Tiffany Ramos , a Hunter College High School class of 2012 and Harvard class of 2016 alum, has taken on the Chair position at ESPI’s newly formed Associate Board, building off of her experience in various roles at ESPI since 2014, including serving as an advisor to the board, an in-class summer tutor, student mentor, and administrative coordinator. Tiffany worked for the Boston Consulting Group for three years post graduation and is currently a member of the class of 2023 at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. While she has a passion for medicine, she has devoted much of her time to diversity, inclusion and education equality. At Harvard, Tiffany was a four year intern at The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, not only helping students excel in their courses but also training other tutors on efficacy and empathy.
ESPI MOVES TO EAST HARLEM
ESPI spent two wonderful years at Columbia University's medical school campus in Washington Heights and remain grateful for their support, which came at a crucial time during our inception. ESPI is now delighted to benefit from the generosity of Hunter College. We have been assigned to classrooms at the beautiful Silberman School of Social Work in East Harlem. It truly takes a village, and we are so fortunate to have the support of these iconic New York City’s institutions.
Thanks to all our generous donors !

This spring ESPI received a renewal of our grant from Con Edison, our first institutional supporter, and an initial grant from the Edward S. Moore Family Foundation. Further foundation grant requests and queries are in the works for the fall application cycle. We could not do all this without you!