Marianna has always loved cloth. She still loves the doll her grandmother in Guatemala made for her by sewing the body and using scraps of colorful fabric she had woven herself for the clothes.

Now, as a teenager, Marianna always notices fabrics, how they feel and stretch, how much they cost, the colors and patterns, how they flow as a dress or hanging off a table. She buys old clothes at the thrift store and sews them into new ones.

She gets good grades in her classes – all As and Bs – but feels frustrated that she can’t pursue the thing she loves most in school. She learned about fashion design as a career from the internet and is hungry to learn everything she can about it. She wishes she didn’t have to wait.

At New Village Academy, Marianna will jump on the chance to do an internship, first at a fabric store and then with a local fashion designer.

By 12th grade, she can get paid as an apprentice by the fashion design company, where they have come to value her as a team member. Her internship supervisor coaches her about her career plans at quarterly Navigation Team meetings, and helps her parents understand what’s involved in becoming a fashion designer.

After two summers and a year of working as an apprentice fashion designer, the company she works for offers to pay part of her tuition to attend Maryland Institute College of the Arts (MICA) to get a 4-year degree, while she continues to work with them, choosing fabrics for their designs and learning the marketing and accounting sides of the business.

Gabriel is outgoing and fun to be around. He has always been a quick learner. When he was 12, he did some research online and, through trial and error, figured out how to create a self-sustaining fish food cycle in his uncle’s giant fish tank.

But especially as he’s gotten older, the whole school deal doesn’t make sense to him. Filling in worksheets and proving to teachers that he knows what he knows in exchange for a grade has always felt like a waste of time. So he mostly doesn’t bother turning in assignments and fails most of his classes.

Gabriel’s parents get mad about his grades. His teachers say he’s not living up to his potential and that he needs good grades to go to college. But if college is like high school, he’d honestly rather skip it and go straight into the real world.

At New Village Academy, Gabriel will be able to see the purpose of everything he does. He can track how his skills are growing, and feels like he is DOing school instead of having it done TO him.

A field trip to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (during a Community Action Project about flooding in Downtown Annapolis) leads him to an internship, where he gets excited about understanding the impact of climate change on the Bay. As part of his internship, he builds an animated computer model that shows the impact of rising water temperatures on oxygen levels and plant and animal life in the Bay.

Taking Community College classes in 11th grade makes him realize that college is more interesting than he thought. He wants to apply to the Marine Biology program at St. Mary’s College because the Chesapeake Bay Foundation team took him to a conference where the professor gave a really interesting talk.

Jordan couldn’t wait to go to school in kindergarten. He loved seeing all his friends from his neighborhood and hearing the stories the teacher read aloud. He was wiggly but soaked up new information like a sponge. But after hearing the teacher call his name in an angry voice many times a day, Jordan began to realize that school was no fun at all, because the teacher only liked the kids who were quiet and boring.

Now Jordan feels like he’d rather be anywhere but school. He does enough work to pass, trying not to disappoint his mom, but feeds his curiosity outside of school by fixing cars with his uncle, watching interesting YouTube videos, and hanging outside in the neighborhood.

At New Village Academy, Jordan will find that his teachers treat him differently, with mutual respect that makes him want to be a better person, instead of making him angry. He joins a Community Action Project where the class studies Annapolis housing issues – the history of public housing, redlining, and the current housing crisis.

They present their research and ideas to the Mayor about how to make subsidized housing in Annapolis more livable and healthy for young people. After that “CAP”, Jordan’s natural curiosity turns to housing issues, finance, and community development.

Now he has a reason to push himself to excel in Math. He arranges an internship for himself at the Annapolis Housing Authority and then at a mortgage bank. He uses what he learns about loans for first-time buyers to help his mom make a plan to buy a home. He is planning to go to college so he can pursue a career in Urban Planning or Finance and help others like he helped his mom.

Juan is just learning English at age 16. He was an excellent student in his elementary school back home in El Salvador but stopped going when he was 10 to help his family make ends meet.

Because of this interrupted schooling, he has found high school in the US really hard. When his new school tested him, they said he was at a 3rd grade level in Math, even thought he took the test in Spanish.

He is not sure it makes sense to be in school at all – he wants to focus on earning money to send home to his family in El Salvador, even if its only at minimum wage. Every hour in school is an hour he isn’t earning money. Since he mostly talks to other Spanish students, he is not learning that much English anyway. And most of the classes are confusing and probably won’t help him get a job.

At New Village Academy, Juan will quickly bond with his Crew, when his natural leadership skills come out on the ropes course at Arlington Echo Outdoor Center in the first month of school.

Now he has a great reason to practice speaking more English to interact with his new friends. During Skills Workshop each morning, he uses online tools that he can keep using even after graduation to improve his reading and math skills in Spanish and in English. He finds out from the work-based learning coordinator that plumbing is an in-demand, high-wage career. He tries it as an intern and loves it.

His improved English skills allow him to take Community College certification coursework in plumbing and he starts a paid apprenticeship in 11th grade two full days a week and full-time in the summer, while he finishes high school, completing his full 2000-hour registered apprenticeship one year after graduation. In his chosen career as a plumber, Juan will be earning more than a lot of college graduates by the time he is 20.

Marcus knows he can come off as awkward. He’s always found it harder to make friends than other people. In middle school, things have gotten worse. He gets knocked around in the hallway and laughed at in class. Marcus is trans, so some people target him just for that.

He’s become more and more withdrawn, wearing his hoodie and earbuds all day, and has stopped doing schoolwork. The only time he is happy is when he is gaming, where no one can see him in person and other gamers just respect his skill. The more his Dad pressures him to go to school, the more he dreads it.

At New Village Academy, Marcus will find himself in a Crew – a group of 14 students and a teacher (Crew Leader) that meets every day. In Crew, students get to know each other really well. Marcus discovers that a really social student in his Crew is also a gamer, and gradually learns to share more of himself, trusting that Crew makes high school feel safer and more inclusive.

Now that he feels safe, Marcus’s brain can relax and he finds that school isn’t so bad. During Skills Workshop, his math teacher suggests he read a book series about a weird, math genius guy named Fred. Learning through stories actually teaches him Math, which had been his least favorite subject.

He moves up three grade levels in one year on his Math benchmark tests and starts using probability in his gaming strategy. He found an online internship with a game designer. Thanks to his newfound confidence, he aced the interview and will start interning with the company next quarter.

Kiyana has always been up for a challenge. She’s been teaching herself math since she was 10.

She was already learning Algebra then, and now she’s working on Calculus. She wants to take college classes to keep getting better, but the A-day/B-day schedule in high school means she can only take evening classes, at a time when the advanced math courses aren’t offered. And she won’t be allowed to take Calculus in high school until 11th grade.

Her grandmother doesn’t want to make a fuss, and she doesn’t know that much about how to help a kid like Kiyana because she didn’t go very far in school. Kiyana likes being around her friends at school, but the requirements of high school feel like they are holding her back.

At New Village Academy, Kiyana will hop on the Anne Arundel County Transit bus to the Community College every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon to take advanced Math courses.

She also interns with a computer programmer on Wednesdays and now realizes how it compliments her interest in math. As an internship project, she works with one of the programmer’s clients to build an app for an astronomy conference.

Since she has met all the Math requirements for graduation – both testing and portfolio-based – she spends her Skills Workshop time in school testing new ideas using the 3-D printer, teaching herself Swahili, reading Lit Lab books, and helping her Crewmates with Math.

She plans to lead a Community Action Project for other New Village students, with the help of a Data Visualization specialist from the US Census Bureau, to build an interactive modeling tool to represent Annapolis health outcomes. It will also be her AP Capstone project.

Sierra was in and out of foster care for most of her elementary school years. She had some experiences no child should have to endure. And to make matters worse, she was attacked in the street last summer.

Now at school, she feels threatened sitting in class with people behind her. She has gotten into fights because someone surprised her from behind in the hall and she just reacted too fast. At other times, she feels so sleepy she can barely stay awake in class.

She hasn’t told anyone about her struggles – she really doesn’t have anyone she trusts. Needless to say, schoolwork is not her highest priority and even when she wants to bring her grades up, she really struggles to read and generally gives up before she’s done enough of the work to be worth turning in to the teacher.

At New Village Academy, Sierra will take a long time to trust her Crew. But starting every day in that small group where everyone knows her, and with a teacher who came to visit her apartment before school, feels like solid ground to stand on.

During Skills Workshop time, she gets extra one-on-one help with reading. As part of a Community Action Project, she helps run a literacy program at the elementary school – teaching struggling 3rd graders the rules of phonics that she never really knew until she taught them to others.

She likes it so much that she is thinking she might want to be a teacher to help kids who struggle like she did. Her Crew Leader tells her there are a lot of scholarships available for teacher preparation programs. Having that goal gives schoolwork a purpose, and she feels more interested in learning than she has ever been.