When Concourse Village Elementary School (CVES) opened in 2013 in the wake of the planned phaseout of P.S. 385, which the New York City Department of Education had tagged with a D, students were struggling academically.
Sorden, a former literacy specialist and teacher, felt that a strong foundation in reading and writing underpinned success across all content areas—and she made it the school’s mission to be literacy-first. Today, students employ collaborative literacy strategies to support science and social studies units, for example, and bring their narrative skills to bear while making predictions and inferences as they analyze artwork.
