The Bridge to Brilliance

Be inspired by the magnetic young principal who  “stands on the front line of the fight to educate America's children. (Brandon Stanton author of Humans of New York ) and the book that Essence calls   Essential reading.   In 2010 Nadia Lopez started her middle-grade public school Mott Hall Bridges Academy in one of America’s poorest communities in a record heat wave—and crime wave. Everything was an uphill battle—to get the school approved to recruit faculty and students to solve a million new problems every day from violent crime to vanishing supplies—but Lopez was determined to break the downward spiral that had trapped too many inner-city children. The lessons came fast: unengaged teachers wayward students and the educational system itself rarely in tune with the already disadvantaged and underprepared.   Things were at a low ebb for everyone when one of her students told a photographer that his principal “Ms. Lopez” was the person who most influenced his life. The posting on Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York site was the pebble that started a lucky landslide for Lopez and her team. Lopez found herself in the national spotlight and headed for a meeting with President Obama as well as the beneficiary of a million-dollar campaign for the school to fund her next dream: a field trip for her students to visit another school—Harvard.   The Bridge to Brilliance is a book filled with common sense and caring that will carry her message to communities and classrooms far from Brooklyn. As she says modestly “There are hundreds of Ms. Lopezes around this country doing good work for kids. This honors all of them.”