Vincent Dotoli ’91 is an active listener, a skill he honed at Union in psychology Professor Suzie Benack’s adolescence and moral development courses. He is also the founder and architect of an innovative private academy for grade-school students near Central Park in Harlem.
“Suzie Benack helped me hone my sense of where kids are coming from. It served me well as a teacher, and it goes on as an administrator. It’s empathy really. It’s the understanding of where someone else is coming from,” Dotoli said.
As the Harlem Academy finishes its fifth year, Dotoli is learning to re-apply his skill as an active listener. Sure, there are 74 students in grades one to five at the academy and about 20 new students set for next September. But the pupils are supported by an involved group of parents, teachers and donors. So, as head of school and chief architect of the academy, Dotoli has had to become a really active listener.
During the school year, Dotoli’s average work day begins at 7 a.m. and ends at 5 p.m. But, at the Harlem Academy, the time investment is a two-way street.
“We expect parents to be educational partners. We make sure we are regularly conferencing with them. We have parent workshops. We include them in our leadership committees,” Dotoli said.
The framework for the academy was formed during Dotoli’s work as a graduate student in education administration at Columbia University, beginning in 2001. With help from advisor Edmund W. Gordon, the Harlem Academy and 12 first-grade pupils began classes in a rented studio near Columbia’s campus in September 2004. Since then, the academy has grown but the basic goal has remained: Provide top-notch grade-school education to qualifying children without regard to family financial resources by using a sliding tuition scale that ranges from $400 to $16,500.
“This school is built around a strong foundation of making sure the kids excel in reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematics and public speaking. It is a very traditional curriculum. What is unusual is that we are getting great results while the public schools around us are essentially failing,” Dotoli said.
Two-thirds of the academy’s students rank in the top 20 percent nationally in math skills. Half score in the top 20 percent in reading, according to Dotoli. The school fielded 400 inquires last year for 21 slots. Those statistics are evidence that Dotoli, a former teacher and administrator at two elite New England private schools, has helped transfer prep school basics to an accessible inner city academy.
But that work comes with a price tag. The academy’s annual budget of roughly $1.2 million is supported by 15 percent tuition and 85 percent annual fund.
“It’s a heavy lift,” Dotoli said.
But the academy has enjoyed corporate support from Van Wagner Communications, an outdoor advertisement company, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs and several philanthropic foundations.
Jennifer Prince is enrollment director at the academy and began working with Dotoli, who she reflexively calls “Mr. Dotoli,” in October 2004. She has seen him lead by example, saying, “We see him work so hard, so we want to work harder.”
But Prince agrees that hard work is only half the equation. Parents can be demanding. Teachers have ideas and often want to bring in new classroom programs to advance learning. Part of the academy’s success stems from Dotoli’s ability to listen and react, she said.
“He is always available to have those conversations with teachers and parents. It’s not just a conversation. He is going to do something with that. They appreciate that,” Prince said. “We feel like part of a growing school. It’s not just Mr. Dotoli doing in alone.”
As a student at Union, Dotoli was a Theta Delta Chi fraternity member, a psychology major and was active in the Schenectady Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. Aside from Benack, Dotoli counts English Professor Frank Gado’s course on the short story and history Professor Steven Sargent’s course dealing with the Scientific Revolution as formative courses.
After graduation, Dotoli worked as a teacher or administrator in private schools in Maine, Rhode Island and, most recently, in Cambridge, Mass. at the 125-year-old Buckingham Browne & Nichols. But, as he recently told Forbes magazine, “Those students were going to be successful whether I was there or not.”
So, at age 31, he enrolled at Columbia and began work on a thesis project aimed at creating a private urban school that prized parental involvement and placed renewed emphasis on rigorous academic study in areas like math, composition, debate and critical thinking.
“When I was at Union, we took courses that represented every discipline in the College’s curriculum. We had to take courses from all different areas. And being exposed to such a wide array of disciplines with high-quality instruction and the chance to acquire a real base of knowledge was critical to me as a teacher and administrator who wants to share a love of learning,” Dotoli said.