Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology

Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology is a winning school where teens may take apart a computer and put it back together, master a programming language like Java or become certified in Photoshop.

Opened in 2011, the school has quickly developed warm traditions and effective teaching methods. Top graduates have been accepted to highly selective colleges such as Johns Hopkins, Occidental, Babson, Swarthmore, and Brown.

“The school clearly moves the needle: While 80 percent of students who enter are performing below grade level, 65 percent leave at or above it,” The Hechinger Report said. 

Gateway offers an unusual level of personal attention. It has special math and reading classes for 9th-graders with weaker skills. Students who fall behind stay for small group instruction the last period of each day. There are four guidance counselors, a large number for a school so small. 

“You can’t fall through the cracks,” says principal Kristina Dvorakovskaya, a former physics and math teacher and alumna of Stuyvesant High School who became head of the school in 2017.

Freshmen study software engineering, information technology, and digital design and animation, then choose one field of concentration. All students take four years of math and science; calculus and other Advanced Placement courses are offered. Spanish speakers may take AP Spanish their freshman year, whether or not they are strong in other subjects. “This levels the playing field,” says Dvorakovskaya.

Teachers visit incoming students at their homes before the school year starts; at the end of the summer, new students participate in “gateaway,” an overnight camping trip with staff to make new friends and push their limits through various challenges. During the year, parents don silly hats and join the annual “holi-gate” celebration featuring hot cider, cookies and crafts. The school band performs singing telegrams on Valentine’s Day.

“One of the things that makes Gateway unique is the strong sense of tradition,” the principal says. “Relationships are really at the core of everything we do here.”

Students take charge in many ways at Gateway, she says. They design and print posters and flyers for school dances and family movie nights. They lead their own club fair and student conferences.  A group of senior girls organized a campus-wide walkout for gun control and put up a Go Fund Me page to raise money to hire a bus to take a group to a march in Washington.

Clubs include robotics, creative writing, music, art and digital photography. The global immersion club, which takes one international trip each year, has been to Costa Rica, Europe, Japan and, soon, the Galapagos Islands. The "gamer haven" club is especially popular.

Boys outnumber girls about four to one, but girls take charge in a weekly activist group called Leadership for Change.

Gateway is one of more than 20 schools created and run by the nonprofit Urban Assembly. It shares the Graphics Educational Campus with the Business of Sports School and Mather Building Arts & Craftsmanship High School (as well as Success Academy Hell's Kitchen Charter School). Sports, ROTC and some events are campus-wide.

The building has a metal detector. Students are scanned several days a week for random checks rather than every time they enter the building.

ADMISSIONS: The school has no admissions requirements. Priority to Manhattan students or residents. About 2,000 8th-graders applied for 108 spots in 2018. (Lydie Raschka, web reports and interview, April 2018)