Bridges to Academic Success

Bridges is an extensive collaboration among high school language and literacy teachers, subject area teachers, school administrators in several high schools in NYS, and CUNY researchers. Bridges serves a population of immigrant students who have recently entered public high schools as “English language learners” or “emergent bilinguals” (our preferred term), but who have low levels of home language literacy upon entry to ninth grade. In Bridges, these students attend a sheltered program at their high school, with dedicated classes that have been specifically designed to meet their language, literacy, academic, socio-cultural and emotional needs.