On his time at Beaver…
I actually started at Beaver in 10th grade, so I was only there for three years, but I would say it was really transformative for me. I really hated school throughout elementary and middle school. I was never a particularly great student. I really thrived at Beaver, I sort of came into my own and learned to love learning. I had wonderful teachers, and I think the sense of community really allowed me to get involved in a lot of different things. I worked for the student newspaper, I played sports, I was in student government. There were just lots of opportunities to get involved in student life that I think I probably would not have been able to do at a larger school. It also meant I was able to develop really close relationships with other students and get to know the faculty and develop close relationships with teachers. That was helpful and important for me, the sense of community.

“I really thrived at Beaver, I sort of came into my own and learned to love learning.”

– Jacob Mnookin ’97

On his path to a career in education…
After graduating from Beaver I went to Middlebury up in Vermont which is a small liberal arts college. I majored in English and political science and didn’t really know what I wanted to do upon graduating. Around the time I was getting ready to graduate, I heard a 30-second elevator pitch from a representative for Teach For America. I had never heard of Teach for America before but it seemed like sort of a good opportunity to do something productive for a few years while I figured out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, so I applied and got in. I never set out thinking I would become a teacher or a life-long educator, but was placed in Newark, NJ, teaching high school English. That experience definitely had a big impact on me for two reasons. One, I really fell in love with teaching and working with kids in a way that I wasn’t necessarily anticipating. There’s something for me very magical about being around kids when they have that lightbulb moment where they learn something for the first time or realize something or engage in a conversation that they feel passionate about. I just loved being around that and being a part of that. And then two, I was able to see firsthand the educational inequities that plague many parts of the country. As an upper middle class white Jewish kid from Newton, I think I was relatively sheltered from what public education is like in a lot of inner cities across the country and probably rural areas, too. I think an education like that would not have been acceptable to better-off families in other parts of the country. That just struck me as profoundly unfair in a way that I had been unaware of before. Woefully ignorant, I guess. So those two things had a big impact on me: I loved working with kids, and seeing this educational inequity. Both compelled me to make this my career.

On founding Coney Island Prep…
Coney Island Prep opened in 2009. Something that has always been important to me is creating a strong sense of community; that we are of this community, for this community, that the staff knows all the students, the students know all the staff, families feel like they are not only always welcome to come to the school but that it is their school, too. Starting anything is really hard, it takes a lot of time, effort, and energy, but I always knew that the only way that I’d be able to put in the time needed to do it was if I really loved the people I was working with and the work that I was doing. Creating that strong sense of community is a big part of it. Knowing that the people who you’re working with are in it for the right reasons, believe in the mission of the organization and the school, care about the kids and the community and families, and want to be there. That’s always been really important to me from the first day. That is something that Beaver certainly did really well when I was there that I wanted to carry through.

On his current focus as a school leader…
We have certainly placed a big emphasis in the past four years on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and thinking about what it means to work with a population that isn’t always included or treated as equal, and what sort of responsibilities we have, what biases we bring to the job. Sort of related is understanding that our students are people that we need to respect and acknowledge as such, in a way that maybe wasn’t so obvious. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. Some of the structures that we had in place around discipline, etc., we have been trying to reimagine them over the past couple of years taking into account who each individual kid is and seeing them as an individual person to figure out what are the strengths that they bring to the school. How can we meet them where they are and help them get to where they need to get, rather than trying to create structures and systems that treat every kid as the same? Trying to view kids more as individuals and trying to help our staff realize that students have strengths that they can bring to school every day.

On how his Beaver experience has informed his practice as a school leader…
The sense of agency. I feel like I had a lot of say in what my high school experience was and what the future held for me. I felt like I had a lot of control over that. So wanting to create an environment where our students feel the same way. They feel that they have agency over both the work that they’re doing now and, also, what their future holds for them. It’s really important to me that kids, when they graduate from Coney Island Prep, feel that they can go off and do or be whoever they want to be. They could get whatever job they want. If they want to be a lawyer, they feel like they have the education they need to get to the college that will allow them to be a lawyer. If they want to be a doctor, if they want to join the army—whatever it is that they want to do, that they feel like Coney Island Prep has opened doors for them. That idea of choice, giving kids choice to make decisions that they feel will allow them to live their happiest, most complete life, that’s always been really important.