With back to school here for the 2024-2025 school year, learn about the various programs and opportunities Paradiso College Preparatory has to offer children.
Paradiso College Preparatory School System provides a college preparatory education to students through academic rigor, character development, and multilingual & STEAAMS-based educational programs that will ensure students' success in high school, college, and beyond.
Grounded on the belief that all students can learn and achieve at high levels when provided with the right levels of support, we expect the following to be true in every Paradiso College Prep classroom. We have 6 key elements to this Vision:
Students will be engaged in reading authentic and relevant literature that is purposeful, aligned and consistent with our schools' community values of courage, empathy, and teamwork and our values of temperance, prudence, and justice. Students will write across content areas daily, expressing themselves clearly and concisely.
Students will approach rigorous scientific and mathematical concepts with curiosity and zeal and apply their learning to solve complex real-world problems.
Students will speak more than one language, learning and solidifying the bilingual skills that are assets in our modern interconnected world while also gaining a deep understanding and pride in their native language and culture.
Students will be engaged in rigorous discussions of current affairs from an angle that is grounded in our school's core values of courage, empathy, teamwork, and personal values of temperance, prudence, and justice.
Students will eagerly express their opinions, support their opinions with evidence, and incorporate new learning and insights from their peers.
Teachers will be masters of their craft, knowledgeable of their content areas, and well-versed in small-group instruction. They will effectively differentiate content and instruction for all levels while ensuring that every student is challenged by rigorous instruction and curriculum. Teachers will be obsessed with gathering data and will use it to effectively drive instruction to close academic gaps and ensure all students are prepared to succeed in high school, college, and beyond.
At Paradiso College Preparatory (PCP), our core beliefs drive our educational vision. We recognize the challenges students, families, and educators have faced due to economic struggles, natural disasters, and the pandemic. Committed to closing the achievement gap, we invest in personnel, resources and facilities, as well as creat personalized learning plans (PLPs) to ensure grade-level instruction and rigor. Our multilingual approach and Dual Language Two-Way Bilingual program accelerate language acquisition. Moreover, we prioritize character development by instilling our school community's core values of Courage, Empathy, and Teamwork, to empower students to be future leaders and positive change agents. These beliefs underpin our mission to prepare students for success in high school, college, and society through creating a transformative educational experience.
In Puerto Rico currently, given many of the challenges students, families, and educators have faced over the last decade, it has become increasingly difficult for students to receive highly rigorous educational services that can help students prepare for college and future careers. PCP intends to assist students in closing the achievement gap, which resulted from over a decade of the island’s economic recession, natural disasters, and, most recently, the Covid Pandemic. PCP will achieve this goal by investing in the personnel, educational resources, and facilities to meet our island students’ needs.
At PCP, we will provide proactive and intentional support through our Personalized Learning Plans (“PLPs”) created for each student. The following is an overview of the PLP process:
A PLP is a formal, individual student instructional plan that strategically addresses the closing of academic achievement gaps while ensuring that students receive the proper grade-level instruction and rigor. This approach is successfully used at high-performing schools such as Classical Charter Schools in the South Bronx, our academic inspiration school that consistently achieves 90 percent-plus passing rates in NY state academic achievement exams.
As part of the PLP process, we will roster students into heterogeneous groups based on academic proficiency. Each grade level class will have students equally distributed based on performance on NWEA MAP and META assessments to facilitate the delivery of targeted support. We will then adjust rosters based on WIDA Language Proficiency Levels.
Ensuring that “Entering,” “Emerging,” and “Developing” students are grouped homogeneously in homerooms allows for more targeted support via our multilingual approach. This rostering process allows us to schedule thoughtful and targeted in-class interventions for all students through a small-group instructional model. This will ensure a balance between maintaining an inclusion model (that includes students in the Special Education program) and providing targeted support for students with academic gaps who also happen to be either Emerging Bilinguals or students with disabilities.
We will track student performance on weekly standards-based assessments (utilizing the Common Core Coach system from Triumph Learning) and will use interim assessments, as well as mid-year NWEA-MAP data, to make decisions regarding cohort adjustments.
A multilingual approach accelerates second language acquisition and drives overall academic achievement for Emerging Bilingual students. At PCP, we believe that student's academic achievement can be accelerated by creating a Dual Language Two Way Bilingual program to ensure students build knowledge and the language skills necessary to make the linguistic connections that will permit the natural knowledge transfer process to take place from their native language to the second language.
The multilingual approach helps stimulate and improve the brain’s executive function abilities as a result of the code-switching process generated by learning and regularly using more than one language within a multilingual program.
Dual language education allows English learners to close the achievement gap and even their native English-speaking classmates on standardized tests. We also know that Dual Language 2-Way Bilingual is one of many bilingual education approaches. While this is our primary model, we will also utilize ESOL Sheltered Instruction, Bilingual push-in, and pull-out models as part of our multilingual approach.
Values-based, positive character development builds skills needed for success in life to prepare students for success in high school, college, and society. PCP will ensure that students develop the values, character traits, and habits that will enable students to become leaders and change agents.
We know that character education teaches the habits of thought and deeds that help people live and work together as families, friends, neighbors, communities, and nations. We are committed to providing every student at PCP with a school-level experience that will honor their dreams and aspirations while teaching values-based habits that will carry with them throughout their lives.
Our school culture will emphasize our school community's core values of Courage, Empathy, and Teamwork; and the individual student values of Prudence, Temperance, and Justice. These values were specifically selected because they tie into our goal of developing students of character who can bring about positive change in their communities. For this they will need the empathy to understand those in need, the courage to pursue the action steps necessary to bring about the needed change while valuing the importance of teamwork to achieve these goals.
