Guest Post by Michelle Healy

With her colleagues, Michelle Healy is spending the 2012-2013 school year crossing the country to identify successful practices from schools of every kind before her team designs and opens its own model public school in New York City. For this blog, she is sharing some of those stories and how they relate to what she sees in each new episode of A Year at Mission Hill.

Last fall, over a lunch of burritos, my colleagues and I listened to a group of students from ACE Leadership High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They had just returned from a meeting with their city's mayor, Richard Berry, and they were eager to tell us about the project at the center of it all -- a project that began with an exploration into their own personal identities. They talked about who they were and what they stood for. They shared their excitement about reading the bookAlbuquerque by Rudolfo Anaya, and using the text to discuss the identity of their own city. And then they applied their knowledge to the creation of an urban design plan that would revitalize and grow Albuquerque into a 21st century city while still maintaining its distinct personality and flavor.

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