Excerpts-

• From the cover Chapter One
  
  Because Introduction Should Mean More
  
  The first Summit Preparatory Charter High School class graduated on a beautiful, sunny June day in 2007 in Redwood City, California, about a half hour south of San Francisco. This graduation looked nothing like any other school’s in the nation. There was no alphabetization of graduates by last name, no valedictorian, no outside speaker, no rushing of kids across the stage while the audience held their applause until the end. Just as we’d approached the school itself over the past four years, we wanted to do graduation differently, and intentionally.
  
  We had a temporary campus that year, situated on a portion of the twenty-­two-­acre Sequoia High School grounds, and we’d borrowed the campus’s Carrington Hall for the ceremony. A historic Spanish-­style theater built in the early 1920s, Carrington had traditional orchestra, mezzanine, and balcony seating to accommodate four hundred people, and a grandeur that added a sense of seriousness and importance to the occasion. We were finally living up to the promise I had made to all of these families when they took a chance on the school. One of the things that made Summit unique was that 100 percent of Summit’s graduates met four-­year-­college entrance requirements (the national average was around 40 percent). And 98 percent (all that had applied) were accepted to at least one four-­year college.
  
  As the school’s principal, I gathered with the eighty graduates a good block away from the auditorium so we could line up and enter the theater without parents and family seeing us beforehand, much like a bride enters a wedding chapel. Every such decision about this day had been carefully thought through.
  
  The graduates walked in with their mentor groups. Every student had a mentor, someone who was also a teacher, as well as a group of fifteen to twenty other students they met with throughout their school career. Our mentors had developed special relationships with the students they coached and supported. Each mentor was someone the students trusted, whom they could talk to, who cared about them and their success, who met with them daily, had eaten meals at their homes with their families, and had been their advocate. Sometimes our mentors worked with their students to clarify their academic goals. But just as often, they helped them sort through a problem at home, or navigate a stressful social dynamic.
  
  Each of the graduates was also accompanied into the auditorium by someone who had been important to their journey in life, like a parent or relative. The mentor’s efforts complemented those of the family member; together they committed to supporting the student that day, and into the future.
  
  I stopped to straighten ties, reposition caps, to accept hugs and pose for pictures. Isabella grinned a dimpled smile as she teased, “Ms. Tavenner, are you ever going to stop fussing over us?” I poked back, “I’m going to have to. You’re leaving me.” My heart constricted at the thought, and I moved on before my emotions began to overflow.
  
  The building was filled to capacity. Every single person rose as one to applaud as we walked down the aisle. I watched the faces of the graduates’ parents and tried to imagine how I would feel when Rett, my son, would make this walk with me. Tonight, I spied him in the front row with his father, wildly waving his five-­year-­old hand to catch my attention.
  
  When at last the deep red, heavy curtain was raised to reveal the entire class up on the stage, the crowd exploded into cheers. The fragile...