A school is only as strong as the people who are a part of it! ARISE is fortunate to have some truly remarkable individuals on board.
Principals:
G ReyesG Reyes likens himself to water that flows thru cracks & crevices carving out opportunities for becoming more than what we are today. This process of becoming has led him to bring over a decade of well-rounded critical education experiences from K-12, Youth Development, teacher development, and university settings to his new role as one of ARISE High School's co-Principals. G Reyes most recently comes to us as the former Executive Co-Director and Youth Leadership Director of Oakland Leaf, an arts and social justice youth development organization. Within Oakland Leaf, he founded and taught high school age youth in the high school critical media program, Youth Roots, towards becoming teacher intellectuals and Artivists By Any Medium Necessary (Asante, 2008). G Reyes is also working towards completing his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education's program in Language Literacy Culture and Society. His current research intersects Critical Media, Critical Social Theory, Literacy Theory, Knowledge of Self Theory, and Critical Pedagogy into Youth Development as a structural framework and Hip Hop as a Cultural Production framework. Through those intersecting discourses, he is advancing a concept he refers to as "Critical Collective Cultivation". In addition to his primary research, G Reyes actively seeks to progress the movement in Teacher Education, School Reform, and Teacher Professional Development, by reappropriating the concepts of Flow, Layer, Rupture that Tricia Rose (1994) discusses in Black Noise. As a public intellectual, he has presented & keynoted at numerous conferences across the country, university classes, school staffs, and youth programs. As a knowledge producer, he has also written an out-of-print text called "Finding the Poetic High" and articles for journals such as California English, Multicultural Education, and the Institute for Social Justice and Education. Additionally, G Reyes has a forthcoming chapter in an edited text called The Arts and English Language Learners: Building Culturally Responsive, Critical and Creative Programs in School and Community Contexts.
Kate SugarmanAfter receiving her BA in Anthropology from Columbia University, Kate Sugarman became a teacher through the New York City Teaching Fellows. She taught Middle School for two years before joining a small High School where she taught Humanities for four years. During her time in Brooklyn, Kate became extremely involved in the development of performance-based assessment and innovative school design. Since moving to Oakland in January 2007, Kate has worked as a coach for teachers and a consultant on school development.
Founding Leaders of ARISE High School:
Romeo Garcia, ARISE's Founding Co-Principal and current Director of College Guidance and Community Partnerships, earned a Bachelors degree in Theater Arts and Rhetoric from Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. At Mills College since 1983, he has earned a California Teaching Credential, Administrative Credential, a Masters in Education and is currently pursuing an Ed.D in Educational Leadership. In his previous position, Romeo was director of the Upward Bound and Educational Talent Search Programs (TRiO) serving 800 youth in the Oakland community. He served as the Assistant to the President, Janet Holmgren, for four years. As Liaison to the President’s Office, Romeo was a member on the Intersegmental Coordinating Committee of the California Education Round Table. Romeo grew up in Oakland, attended Oakland public schools and worked for six years as a teacher at Brookfield Elementary School in the Oakland Unified School District. Romeo is also a graduate of the Upward Bound Program.
Romeo served several terms on the Board of Directors of the Western Association of Educational Opportunity Personnel (WESTOP), the Julia Morgan School for Girls and the English Center for International Women and is a current board member for the Unity Council serving the Fruitvale District.
Laura Flaxman, ARISE High School’s founding Co-Principal and current Executive Director, brings twenty-one years of experience in urban education to her current role. Prior to joining ARISE, Ms. Flaxman served as Co-Director of the Small Schools Project for the Coalition of Essential Schools where she launched a national project to identify 20 exemplary small high schools across the nation, help them develop the skills to “mentor” others just creating schools, create 10 new schools and convert five large schools into small schools. Laura came to Oakland in 2000 to start Life Academy, a new small autonomous public high school, where she served as principal. Prior to a year at Harvard and an internship at the Boston Arts Academy, Flaxman worked for Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound in New York City helping to create and support several new middle schools and a couple of existing high schools. She taught English, art and social studies at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, a residential treatment center in Manhattan, and South Bronx High School where she coordinated a program with the New York City Outward Bound Center. Laura holds two Master’s degrees: one in Educational Leadership from Harvard University and the other in English from the Bread Loaf School of English. She earned her Bachelor’s at Wesleyan University and her high school diploma at the Bronx High School of Science.
Laura also founded the Oakland Small Autonomous Schools Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and strengthening small public schools in Oakland.
Emma Paulino, who continues to play a leadership role in ARISE High School as a parent organizer, has been a full-time organizer for two and a half years with Oakland Community Organizations (OCO), a faith-based organizing group representing 40,000 Oakland families. Prior to her organizing work at OCO, she was a leader with St. Elizabeth/OCO for six years. Emma provided organizing support for a small schools policy in Oakland and collaborated on the design and organization of ASCEND, a K-8 school in East Oakland, which was one of the first small, autonomous schools developed in Oakland Unified School District. Emma was born in Michoacan, Mexico, and has been in the U.S. since 1985. She is married and has three children in the Oakland Public Schools: Fhatima and MacEdward attend Oakland Technical High School, while Edgardo, Jr., an eighth grade student at ASCEND, hopes to be a founding student at ARISE High School.
The following ARISE Design Team members have also been instrumental in creating our school:
Kristen Chase
Jean Johnson
Brittney Johnson
Mary Franklin
Tonnesha Pace
Landesha Pace
Edgardo Paulino
Guadalupe Barrera
Eileen Barrera
Leslie Barrera
Leah Herrera
Sharonda Green
Josue Hernandez
Julia Hollinger
