{"id":215955,"date":"2026-04-30T21:36:36","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T21:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/215955\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T21:36:36","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T21:36:36","slug":"brooklyns-innovative-jesuit-middle-school-with-james-kennedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/215955\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn’s Innovative Jesuit Middle School with James Kennedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an old Latin saying about some of the famous male founders of religious orders. In translation, it goes like this: \u201cBernard loved the valleys; Benedict loved the mountains; Francis the towns; Ignatius loved great cities.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s probably no surprise that in the U.S., no city has more Jesuit schools than New York, which has nine total across all the educational levels. Our guest today, James Kennedy, is an alum of one of these schools \u2013 Regis High School, where he also taught and led fundraising efforts \u2013 and the current president of another. James is in his third year leading Brooklyn Jesuit Prep, which is a middle school serving low-income families of diverse races, ethnicities and faiths in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. BJP currently serves 100 students, both boys and girls, in grades 5 through 8. The entire student population is composed of students of color and 74% of them are either immigrants or first-generation Americans. Host Mike Jordan Laskey asked James to talk about the school\u2019s history and what makes it a special place.<\/p>\n

James also discussed how anti-immigrant polices and attitudes across our country today are affecting the BJP community and how they\u2019re responding. It was a fascinating conversation about both Brooklyn Jesuit Prep and urban pre-secondary education more broadly. You\u2019ll be struck by James\u2019 passion and depth of insight.<\/p>\n

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s an old Latin saying about some of the famous male founders of religious orders. In translation, it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-215955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}