About

The founding staff and board members saw the need to provide access to a college-preparatory education for children from families in northern Manhattan.

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Our Mission

Empower students to become agents for change through community-focused leadership, character development, and college preparedness.

Our Vision

We regard our students as burgeoning assets to their community and will help them develop the leadership tools they need to be successful in college and beyond.

Our Story

Inwood Academy for Leadership is a 5-12 public school in upper Manhattan that opened its doors to our first cohort of fifth graders, in 2010. The school focuses on college preparedness, character development, and community leadership by emphasizing the development of five different character traits: responsibility, integrity, caring, honesty, and restraint.

As an independent public charter school, we’ve tailored the education experience to provide individualized attention to our more than 900 students. We believe that, if given the chance and the expectations are set high, every student can succeed in life. Our goal is to graduate 100% of our students and ensure they have multiple pathways to succeed in the future.

We are a trailblazer in the New York charter school environment. We welcome every student who applies and is accepted via our lottery and meet students where they are, especially children with special needs or those who speak little to no English, even though they may be behind their peers. In 2009, the founder of Inwood Academy Christina Reyes successfully lobbied for a change in New York State law allowing us to give preference in our application lottery to students who speak English as a second language.

2018 was a milestone year for Inwood Academy as we graduated our first high school class with a graduation rate of 95%, we broke ground on the construction of our new high school campus, and the Class of 2018 was selected as winners for “Say Yes to the Prom.” With a large graduating class and 80% of our alumni in college, the higher education institutions they are attending are wide-ranging and many received full scholarships, including from New York University, the State University of New York at Oneonta, Colgate University, and Swarthmore College.

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