City Neighbors Foundation Seeks Academic Director beginning in 2025-26
City Neighbors Foundation, the operator of a network of three progressive public charter schools serving K-12 students in a diverse community in northeast Baltimore City, is seeking an Academic Director starting in the 2025-2026 school year. We seek a leader who is dedicated to the ideals of progressive education, experienced in establishing a culture of learning among faculty and students, who centers equity and social justice in their leadership, and who exhibits strong servant leadership qualities.
At City Neighbors, we have taken a stand for schooling rooted in the vision of the child as powerful, creative, capable, and deserving of the deepest respect. We have taken a stand for the prevalence of student voices over teacher voices, for the arts as a central component to all teaching and learning, for deep project studies rather than survey courses, for ensuring that standardized testing does not drive teaching and learning, for involving parents and teachers as co-creators of their school, for centering equity and liberatory practices in our approach, for the importance of carefully designed and beautifully created physical spaces for children, and the importance of joy, imagination, and creation in learning for all children. At City Neighbors, we strive to have every student and community member be “Known, Loved, and Inspired.”
City Neighbors schools combine eight educational and community elements designed to work together to inspire children and provide an extraordinary public school education with high academic achievement.
1. A Strong Foundation of Teacher Empowerment - Teachers are researchers of children. They are experts in their work. They not only work to create their classroom cultures and curricula, but they are partners in the creation of our school from practice to policy.
2. Parent-School Partnership – We believe in cooperative governance based on the principles of human dignity, consensus, and freedom; therefore we are structured as a parent-teacher cooperative.
3. Equity and Social Justice – We strive to center principles and practices of equity, social justice, and anti-racism in our work, structures, classrooms, and organizational approaches.
4. Arts-Integration - We believe in a creative, inquiry-based process of teaching and learning that teaches both arts and content to foster deeper understanding in both.
5. Project-Based Learning – Our curriculum is based on in-depth investigations of topics driven by student interest and informed by the Common Core.
6. Reggio Emilia – Children are strong, intellectually rich, and possess great potential; therefore we respect children’s creative capacities and individual learning styles by entering into a research partnership intended to stimulate and deepen children’s critical thinking.
7. Inclusion – All students, no matter their ability and as much as possible, should be educated in general education classrooms.
8. Small School Model – We value the individual attention students receive and the family feel of a small school culture; therefore we intentionally create and maintain small school models.
Job Summary:
City Neighbors Foundation is seeking a founding Academic Director who will partner with school leaders to envision and champion the academic vision, strategy, and instructional coherence across our K-12 schools, ensuring alignment with our mission of high-quality, progressive, inclusive education for all students. This role involves coordinating mission-aligned instruction, facilitating curricular decision-making processes, supporting professional development, promoting the use of authentic data, and fostering teacher growth, all with a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion to create an enriching, community-centered learning environment.
Key Responsibilities:
Academic Vision and Strategy
Serve as the spokesperson for our academic vision, fostering coherence and connection across schools, ensuring that educational programming is high-quality and mission-aligned.
Guide and assess the quality of instruction, maintaining and improving a project-based, arts-integrated, progressive, and innovative approach to learning.
Facilitate curriculum decision-making processes with school leaders.
Educator Professional Development and Support
Partner with school leadership to co-create, and sometimes execute, collaborative professional development spaces for educators, fostering an environment of continual growth.
Support teacher growth cycles, observation, and coaching across schools.
Lead school-wide professional development such as New Educator Orientation and the Teaching Fellows Program.
Manage combined professional development, such as the annual City Neighbors Symposium and external teacher training partnerships, which promotes shared learning and innovation for all educators within City Neighbors.
Instructional Data and Assessment
Lead our organizational data portfolio work, ensuring the effective use of authentic and multi-faceted instructional data to improve learning outcomes.
Develop and collaborate on school-based data structures and systems to support instructional goals.
Collaboration and School Leadership Support
Partner with principals to drive instructional excellence and conduct regular school walkthroughs to support instructional practices and programming across campuses.
Qualifications:
Demonstrated experience in K-12 progressive educational leadership, designing innovative curricula, implementing student-centered instructional practices, project-based learning and arts integration.
Demonstrated success in leading educator-centered and collaborative professional development and growth.
Experience and skill in analyzing and utilizing multifaceted and authentic data to inform and enhance student-centered learning practices
Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work with school leaders, teachers, and community partners.
Master’s Degree or Educational Leadership Certification preferred.
Salary: $100,000 + $20,000 health benefits allowance and 3% retirement match.
Timeline: Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until January 30, 2025. The anticipated start date is July 1, 2025.
To Apply: To apply, submit a resume and cover letter to Mike Chalupa, Executive Director, at mchalupa@cityneighbors.org.
We believe that traditional hiring practices have historically and systemically marginalized entire groups of people — including people of color, people from working-class backgrounds, women, and people in the LGBTQIA+ community to name a few. We believe that we are better as an organization when we work to deconstruct the barriers intrinsic in that system so that our team has authentic representation from diverse communities, backgrounds, and beliefs. Hence, we strongly encourage people with these identities or who are members of other marginalized communities to apply for roles at our organization.