NYC+XQ

The New York City Public Schools and XQ are working together through Imagine NYC Schools, an ambitious initiative to design innovative, high-quality schools with equity and excellence at their core. This is a groundbreaking public-private partnership. Through XQ+NYC, students, teachers, families, and community members are coming together to imagine high schools that are engaging, inclusive, and student-centered—schools that prepare all students for college, meaningful careers, and all the future has to offer. 

Together, the New York City Public Schools and XQ identified five schools to focus on between 2022 and 2024. Three are new; there is also a new partnership: 

• Gotham Tech—Partnering with NYC FIRST, a robotics-based not-for-profit, this model originated as an afterschool program, transitioned to a credit-bearing course, and is now a high school. It opened in Queens with its first class of 9th graders in the fall of 2022.
• School Without Walls—A hybrid program developed with Outward Bound that makes the city its learning environment, and allows students to focus on passion projects. The program is in the process of developing a fully remote option which requires state approval. It opened with its first class of 9th graders in the fall of 2022.
• Design Works High School —A partnership between Bank Street College and Pratt Institute to develop a new high school that applies design thinking to address complex social issues. This new school is slated to open in Brooklyn in the fall of 2023. 
• The Bronx Independent Research Partnership (“BIRP”)—A community of schools built around a common goal of expanding access to and engagement in advanced science research opportunities. This collaboration, currently across six high schools in the Bronx, fosters opportunities including partnerships with local research organizations, increased research programming capacity within each school, and a sense of belonging in the science research space through BIRP community programming. 

There’s also an expansion of an existing model and a redesign:

• Brooklyn STEAM Center—STEAM is serving 11th and 12th graders from eight high schools in Brooklyn in the heart of the Brooklyn Navy Yard—a 300-acre industrial park with over 500 businesses in cutting edge industries. It offers high-quality college prep and career prep, and early college. Each of the five pathways under STEAM’s Career and Technical Education program model is approved by the New York State Education Department and features an industry-approved curriculum, engaging partnerships, supportive work-based learning experiences including an internship program, and stackable industry credentials. The five pathways are: Computer Science and Information Technology; Construction Technology; Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management; Design and Engineering; and Film and Media. The STEAM Center also has plans to expand in the Bronx.  
• Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School—A large comprehensive CTE high school in Queens serving approximately 2,335 students. It’s building a co-op model, where teachers and students will co-design curricula that reflect the modern workplaces that students will enter instead of perpetuating the characteristics of traditional vocational education models.