We work to address the fear through dialogue and support services (see our piece below on the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation). We cultivate the interest through 
dialogue as well, and through nimble lesson-planning. The result is an informed and eloquent student body, as evidenced by the gravity of the Inauguration-Day 
remarks our students made in interviews with 1010 Wins, Bronx 12, CBS, Chalkbeat, Fox5, NBC and Univision. As Middle School Director Beatriz Bañuelos says in this month’s Faculty Spotlight, “We’re going to be better, and we’re going to be better because of people like our students.”

And those students will have college degrees. Please see below the growing list of college acceptances by our first-ever senior class.

Wishing you health through the heart of this winter,

Melissa Melkonian
Founder and Head of School
Funder Spotlight: Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation
During the spring and summer of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the American Dream School (ADS) community. Three ADS students lost their mothers to the virus and many others lost relatives, some of whom lived with them. Still others were abruptly uprooted and moved to the homes of neighbors and/or relatives when their parents became sick. More broadly, the circumstances resurfaced old trauma and fears of homelessness and strained parental relationships. ADS leadership knew that, come fall, it would need additional help meeting the mental health needs of the school community, and it turned to the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

The Foundation’s namesake and benefactor, Virginia B. Toulmin, was a nurse-turned-philanthropist who remained deeply committed to others’ physical and mental health. ADS asked the Foundation’s support of an additional social worker to provide grief counseling and other pandemic-related mental health support to its students and families, and the Foundation generously obliged.

The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, which accepts grant requests only by invitation, had previously sponsored a three-night “College Bound” tour of nine colleges and universities throughout the northeast. ADS students had to complete a mock-college application process to attend and, while many were uncertain about higher education prior to the experience, “By the end of the trip, every single student was committed to going to college,” recalls ADS Founder and Head of School Melissa Melkonian. ADS produced a brief film documenting the experience (above).
 
“We understood that these were kids who would be first-generation college students in long family histories of non-college folks,” says Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Co-Trustee William Villafranco. The Foundation is also led by Co-Trustees Alexander Sanger and Walter Montaigne and by Advisor Richard Mittenthal. “We knew the experience of going to college and the opportunities that the child would receive would have a huge ripple effect for generations to come.” 

“First by helping our students visualize themselves in college and now by supporting the mental health and wellbeing of our students and families at a time when both are at greater risk than ever before, the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation has been an incredible partner in critical aspects of our work,” says Melkonian. ”We are grateful for the Foundation’s support.”
Faculty Spotlight: Beatriz Bañuelos, MS Director
“My parents worked very hard in their jobs and our job was to work really hard at school,” says ADS Middle School Director Beatriz Bañuelos, whose parents emigrated from Mexico to Los Angeles. Her mother worked at an industrial laundry, her father as a gardener. Bañuelos felt pressure to become a doctor and was pre-med her first two years of college before she had a realization: “My parents came to this country so we could have choices. They didn’t have the option of loving their work, but I do.” 

Bañuelos switched majors and became an educator, first with Teach For America and then the New York City Department of Education before joining ADS five years ago. ”I got to work with people who cared for each other, who cared for kids, which I felt I had been missing for the last three-to-four years of my teaching career,” she says.

As Middle School director, Bañuelos oversees the onboarding of students into ADS’s culture as sixth graders, the first year they can attend the school. It begins with a two-week “Boot Camp” prior to school’s start in August, when they take a team-building trip, learn “how they will learn” and more specific things including how to tie a tie and use Google Drive.

“We’re not a no-excuses school because we know there are circumstances in children’s lives. It’s not about changing our expectations but about changing the path to the same expectations because of a student’s needs,” says Bañuelos. She cites the advisory program, which ensures each student has at least one faculty advocate, as critical in helping the school to truly know its students.

With mutual-respect between teachers and students comes fun. In eighth grade humanities class, students learn about and then simulate trench warfare, turning their desks on their sides and having paper ball fights. “It’s loud and it’s nuts and it’s amazing because kids love it so much.”

Recent events have caused Bañuelos to think more than ever about the link between the present and students’ futures. “When we are on field trips, you feel the pressure of your entire community as you walk the halls of the Capitol. And then you see people desecrating the place and think, ‘Have they ever felt the pressure to represent their whole ethnic group?’ I want our kids to know this is their country, too, and that our country is a great place because of people like them. We’re going to be better, and we’re going to be better because of people like our students.”
Our Mission: The American Dream School develops academic excellence in both Spanish and English for grades 6-12, preparing students to excel in college and become leaders in their communities.