Life Academy of Health and Bioscience is a small district middle and high school in the Oakland Unified School District that serves 464 Latino students, of whom 78% are low-income. The school’s mission is to prepare students to become future health professionals.
Students at Life Academy take more than twice as many science courses as are required by the state, and every student completes an internship in the health or biomedical field. While the school’s identity is deeply tied to health and medicine, principal Aryn Bowman credits much of the school’s success to its small size, social justice emphasis, rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum, and a deeply committed teaching staff.
“It’s as if the small school experiment was allowed to happen in some ideal conditions and we are living it out.”
That “experiment” sets Life Academy apart and is changing outcomes for low-income Latino students. Life Academy was one of only eight high schools out of over 200 across the Bay Area that made our 2019 list of Top Bay Area Public Schools for Underserved Students. To qualify, high schools had to close the opportunity gap on three measures of college readiness: graduation rates, college eligibility, and academic performance.
While fewer than half of low-income Latino students in the Oakland Unified School District graduate eligible for a UC or CSU, around two thirds of Life Academy students graduate on a college path.
What is different about Life Academy? The keys to success that Bowman highlights are embedded into all aspects of the school culture:
- Small school environment with built-in individualized student supports.
- Strong, student-centered mission with a clear emphasis on social justice.
- Rigorous experiential and interdisciplinary curriculum that builds out college-level skills.
- Distributive leadership that elevates teacher and student voice.
The school is intentional about committing to these practices at the student, teacher, and administrator level. Click through to learn more about how those practices play out day to day at Life Academy.