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Texas native Jeremy Jones has been
named new director of the YES Prep at Northbrook Middle School program.
Northbrook Middle School is a district-charter collaboration site for the SKY
Partnership that includes the YES Prep program option for middle school
students.
Mr. Jones has served 11 years in
education including roles as a Teach for America instructor, charter principal,
YES Prep math teacher and founding director of the YES Prep Talent team, and an
administrator with the Achievement School District in Tennessee, which has a
goal of moving lowest performing schools to the top quarter academically by
2018.
A graduate of Georgetown High School
in Georgetown, Texas, Mr. Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in political science
and economics in 2004 from Texas A&M University in College Station.
A Teach for America recruit, he
taught special education math for a year at Stella Worley Junior High in
Westwego, La., a Westbank New Orleans campus, before joining YES Prep and
teaching math for three years at the North Central Campus, a middle school in
Houston. He also served three years as the founding director of YES Prep’s
Recruitment/Selection division.
Elsewhere, he served one year as an
elementary principal at Los Suenos Academy in San Jose, Calif., an elementary
Rocket Ship charter school. He worked two years with the Tennessee Achievement
School District.
Director
Jones is excited to be back in Texas and working with the YES Prep and SBISD
partnership.
“Northbrook
Middle School is a unique opportunity to influence the future of 1,100 students
in this whole building, not just in YES Prep,” he says. “The stakes are really
high for all of our kids. They need to view their middle school years as the
start of a seven-year commitment, not just three years.”
At
Northbrook Middle, he will work closely with Northbrook Middle Principal
Valerie Johnson. The two campus leaders have already made a commitment to higher
combined performance.
“We have
an ambitious goal to be ranked among the top 10 schools in Texas over the next
four years. We aren’t underestimating the amount of work to get there, or the
work that will needed by all of our teams to get there. But I believe that this
goal is possible,” he says.
The leadership teams, faculties and
staffs at YES Prep Northbrook and Northbrook Middle are committed to working
together to assure that every student is equipped with both the academic and
life skills to meet the district’s key goal known as Spring Branch T-2-4.
The T-2-4 goal calls for all our
students to successfully complete some form of higher education after
graduation – military training, technical certification, two-year or four-year
college degree.
Outside YES Prep, Mr. Jones believes
in high personal performance goals, too. He has run marathons in a variety of
locations, including Nashville, Tenn.
Director Jones replaces the former
director, Cendie Stanford, who retired earlier this year.