As Head of School at Esperanza Academy, Jadi Taveras is leading a tuition-free, all-girls independent school where students are known deeply, challenged academically, and surrounded by adults who are invested in their dreams. He believes girls in his hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts, deserve schools that honor their brilliance and full humanity.

From his first days as Head of School, Jadi rewrote the story the school was telling about its community. He moved Esperanza away from deficit language and toward a values based narrative that honors the strengths, aspirations, and cultural wealth of families. That shift was more than rhetorical; it changed how the school talks about students and the community, how it invites philanthropy into the work, and how it defines what excellence looks like. He made it clear that Esperanza is an institution ready to lead.

Under Jadi’s leadership, Esperanza has paired high challenge academics with the kind of support that helps students accomplish demanding work. Every Esperanza eighth grader now completes algebra before high school, opening the door to advanced coursework and STEM careers. High expectations are only part of the story, the way students are held, supported, and seen is just as important.

Jadi has made restorative justice an essential part of the school’s ethos. Every adult in the school has advanced training in restorative practices and uses these skills to manage conflicts and build relationships, ultimately infusing a deep sense of emotional and psychological safety. Early in his tenure, he also hired a full time music therapist and built a partnership with Berklee School of Music so students could regularly access a culturally grounded form of care that helps them regulate stress, process emotions, and stay present for learning.

Jadi understands that students can only be as well supported as the adults around them. He has invested in higher salaries, meaningful benefits, and new opportunities for professional growth, including a Traveling Scholars program that helps teachers learn from new places, perspectives, and communities, then bring those insights home to Esperanza. By adding roles in academic leadership, STEM, Graduate Success, student support, and operations, he has helped build a committed community of faculty and staff with the capacity to stay, grow, and meet students with the care and consistency they deserve.

Jadi has also deepened Esperanza’s long term commitment to graduates with sharper strategy and bigger ambition. The Graduate Success program helps alumni navigate high school, college, financial aid, and early career decisions. A new economic mobility agenda is taking shape around student bonds, financial literacy, and microfinance tools that can help young people and families build assets over time. In Jadi’s hands, the promise of Esperanza is a bridge to adulthood with a safety net, so students and alumni are met with the support and stability they deserve.

The strength of this model has already received broad recognition, with the National Partnership for Educational Access honoring Esperanza with a School Leadership in Equity Award for its exceptional support of a historically marginalized community.

In just four years Jadi raised an unprecedented $33 million, the largest private investment in Lawrence’s history, to build a new school. That momentum is helping power Esperanza’s expansion to become the first tuition free independent K to 8 school for girls in the country. What he is building has no parallel. The new school is a physical expression of Jadi’s belief that environment shapes identity, aspiration, and performance. It includes a STEM lab, a Justice Library, dedicated spaces for wellness, music, and arts, a community kitchen, and a no cost bodega. It is a place intentionally built so students can see themselves as scientists, mathematicians, writers, and leaders, and so families can lean on Esperanza for wraparound support offered with dignity, trust, and no strings attached. And so the world knows that brilliance exists and thrives in communities like Lawrence.

As a first generation Latino with a similar background to Esperanza students, this work is personal. What he is building is grounded in one city, but it carries the shape of something much larger. As the new campus opens, Esperanza is poised to become a place where educators and nonprofit leaders from across the country can come to learn concrete practices they can use to help their own communities build assets, careers, and the kind of generational wealth and stability that Esperanza is making possible in Lawrence.