There is a Morehouse College T-shirt pinned to the wall of Papo Morales’s classroom at Achievement First Brooklyn High School. A sixth-grade math teacher gave it to him years ago with a simple instruction: “When you become a teacher, put this up in your classroom.” He did. And every year, for the seniors who walk through Mr. Morales’s door, it starts a conversation.
For Elijah Dupigny, one of those seniors, it helped spark a dream. When Elijah saw the shirt, he told Morales he wanted to go to Morehouse. So did his classmate Alex, the class valedictorian. From that moment, Morales made it his mission to help them reach the colleges they had set their sights on. Today, Elijah is a sophomore at Morehouse College on a full Morgan Stanley scholarship, double-majoring in Economics and Philosophy. Alex is at Brown University. Their success was the result of their own drive, and the steady, relentless support of a teacher who refused to let them dream small.
A Brooklyn native and Achievement First alum — founding class of Crown Heights Elementary, AF class of 2017 — Morales left for college and came back to teach in the very classrooms where he once sat as a student.
“I’m the last man at the door before you enter into the world,” he says. “My job is to care about you here. And my obligation is to care about you when you leave.”
That obligation, in practice, looks different from what most people imagine when they picture a high school teacher. For Elijah, it looked like Morales staying at school until 8:30 p.m., helping him record scholarship video applications again and again until they got it right. It looked like Thai food, late nights, college essays, and financial aid forms.
The first scholarship did not come through. The Morgan Stanley full ride did. And Morales was there for every step.
At AF Brooklyn High, Morales’class is one of the hardest, and it is always packed. Whether he is assigning weekend essays, guiding AP Research students through lengthy papers, or leading rapid-fire questioning sessions that push students to think on their feet, Morales is deliberate about preparing students for more than the next assignment. In AP Literature and AP Research alike, the goal is helping students speak publicly, write with precision, and articulate their ideas clearly — skills that will serve them in college interviews, seminar rooms, and beyond.
For Morales, rigor and care are not competing values. They are inseparable. “It’s not a bad thing to make your bar extremely high,” he says. “There is a way to merge a high bar with a strong amount of love.
That is the most Achievement First thing about Papo Morales. He is a product of AF schools — shaped by its classrooms, its teachers, and its mission — and he came back to give his students the same foundation, and then some. Now, as Grade Level Chair for 12th grade and Teacher in Residence Coordinator, he is shaping not only his own students, but the next generation of AF educators as well.
Elijah puts it simply: “AF offers the resources. It’s now about you taking them and utilizing them. And with the help of Morales, I found myself.”
Morales, for his part, does not spend much time thinking about legacy. He thinks about the late-night study sessions, the scholarship essays he’s helped write, and the former student who called him after school just to say he got a 90 on his paper and wanted to say thank you.
“I just hope that whatever you do, you are happy and you’re doing it well,” he said. “And if you’re pushing yourself, even when you’re exhausted, you keep going. That’s success to me.”
Elijah is a sophomore now, navigating internship applications and a future that might include consulting, public office, or both. He still talks to Morales almost every week. What Morales gave him: how to write an email, how to walk into a room, how to keep going when things feel uncertain, turns out to be exactly what college demands.
Asked to describe his teacher in a single sentence, Elijah did not need a moment to think.
“Mr. Morales is a trailblazer. He develops the changemakers of tomorrow.”
Papo Morales teaches AP English Literature and AP Research at Achievement First Brooklyn High School. Elijah Dupigny is a sophomore at Morehouse College, Class of 2028.