Ashoka
Graville T. Woods Elementary
Granville T. Woods strives to give students a sense of agency and empowerment while enabling them to spark that capacity in their family members and neighbors. Granville T. Woods achieves this through its work with Peace First, which allows all children in the school to learn peacemaking skills and launch their own peacemaking project. Information center specialist and librarian Cleo Jarvis helped students start another agency-instilling initiative at the school: The Philanthropy Roundtable. During the 2011-2012 school year, this student group raised $800 by collecting pennies. They then surveyed the student body about the issues students cared about the most and researched organizations that address those issues. The Roundtable then interviewed the organizations they identified and decided how much of the $800 to distribute to each. This effort led the Roundtable to be named the “New Yorkers of the Year” by New York One.
Laverne C. Nimmons
Dr. Laverne C. Nimmons is an educator who has served for more than eight years as the principal of Granville T. Woods Public School 335 which serves the predominantly African-American Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn neighborhoods. When Dr. Nimmons arrived at P.S. 335,the school had a 30 percent passing rate on the New York State mathematics test and 26 percent in English language arts. The school now boasts a 97 percent passing rate in mathematics and 87 percent in English language arts. Dr. Nimmons credits her research while working on her doctoral dissertation at Fordham University as a significant factor in moving the school to its current success. Her doctoral dissertation examined how underachieving schools in poor urban areas transformed themselves into high performing schools. In addition, P.S. 335 was the only school that won the Blue Ribbon Award in Brooklyn during the 2009-2010 school year and 1 out of 2 schools that won in New York City. Dr. Nimmons also won the Terrell H. Bell Award as a U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon School.