Sara Asmussen 

​Dr. Asmussen is the Founding Executive Director of New Dawn Charter High School, a transfer school in NYC.  She comes from the field of community mental health research with extensive experience managing large scale research projects, budgets, and grant work.  She began her work in education at the Beginning with Children Foundation as the Director of Research, moving to John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy Charter School, the first transfer charter school in NYS, working as the Director of Compliance and Accountability.  Dr. Asmussen was also the original lead data engineer on the PICCS project at CEI, a Federally funded Teacher Incentive Grant, and worked with a number of other charter schools developing data models which incentivized teachers whose students showed academic growth throughout the year. 

​

AAPF17 Sessions: 

Implementing Mentoring Programs with At-Promise Teens ​

​Research shows that students who have strong personal connections at the school setting have a greater chance of achieving academic success. New Dawn leaders will outline how to develop a mentoring program that connects all adults in the school building with every student in the school, including sharing the results at New Dawn, a transfer high school in Brooklyn, NY.  Presenters will share how New Dawn outperforms in persistence and other areas on the NYC School Survey and Quality Snapshot by developing and implementing a mentoring program.  In this hands on session, participants will work in small groups according to their mentoring experience to explore one of three relevant questions:  How can a small scale mentoring program be adopted at your school?  What would be necessary to develop a successful proposal and implement it?  And, troubleshooting current practices: what is working and what isn’t?