From Roxbury Prep Alumna to Future Teacher

Ariana Gomes is a senior at the University of Miami, but this summer she came back to her roots in Boston to prepare for her future career as a teacher and give back to the community

Gomes graduated from Roxbury Prep middle school, and went on to Newton Country Day School in Newton, Mass., for high school. She said she wouldn't have attended that high school without the rigorous academics and support she got at Roxbury Prep.

“I had great teachers growing up. I want to be that type of role model for other students,” she said about her education at Roxbury Prep Mission Hill.

Gomes’ desire to become a teacher led her to the school’s summer program designed to get rising college seniors interested in becoming public school teachers.

The program, called the Uncommon Schools Summer Teaching Fellowship, was created to identify, recruit, and train young people from across the country to become teachers.

Uncommon, of which Roxbury Prep is a part of, attracts rising college seniors who apply to work as teachers in the summer before their senior year of college.

The vast majority of the Fellows are young people of color. The program underscores Roxbury Prep and Uncommon Schools’ commitment to increasing the percentage of teachers of color in classrooms. At Roxbury Prep, nearly 50% of teachers are people of color, more than double the national average for all public schools.

The Teaching Fellowship Program has previously involved in-person schooling over the summer. But because of the pandemic, Uncommon moved the program online into everyone’s kitchens and living rooms. Nearly 140 rising college seniors joined this summer’s program across the Northeast, including nine Uncommon Schools alumni like Gomes.

For Gomes and her peers, much of the summer was spent learning about what it’s like to teach at a high performing school, gaining teacher skills and putting those new skills into practice, albeit online. Some of the Fellows were able to work directly with students under the supervision of master teachers. Every Fellow had a mentor teacher to work closely with.

Uncommon has a tradition of graduates coming back to teach at the school. Over 80% of the college students participating in Uncommon’s summer program this year identify as people of color.

Roxbury Prep educates about 1,500 students in Boston in three middle schools serving grades 5 through 8 and one high school. The mission of Roxbury Prep is to ensure its students get into, succeed in and graduate from college. The college graduation rate of Uncommon Schools alumni is over 50%, nearly five times the national average for students from low-income families.

After she graduates, Gomes would like to come back to teach at an Uncommon School —fulfilling the mission of the program.

“I’ve always felt a strong inclination towards teaching and it would be great to go back to a place that I feel made me, in a sense, and played such a strong role academically in where I currently am,” she said.