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Who We Are
Student Overview
Faculty/Staff
Founders
Trustees
Parent Involvement
Our Graduates
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Dan Corley
Founder and Head
Community Preparatory School
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For most people, community service is a pastime. For Dan Corley, school reform advocate and founder of Community
Preparatory School, it is his life's work.
While a student at Brown University, Dan spent a year living with the homeless and working in soup kitchens in New
York City and Washington, D.C. He served as a VISTA volunteer and, with his wife, was the first house manager for
Advent House, a shelter for the homeless in Providence, R.I. When he began his teaching career, he spent five years
at a school for delinquent boys in Narragansett, R.I.
In 1984, at the ripe old age of 29, Dan founded Community Preparatory School in the heart of South Providence. For
the past two decades, he has implemented and refined innovative teaching techniques that have enabled Community Prep
to grow from a small, neighborhood inner-city school to a model in urban education.
Today, Community Prep serves 150 students and has been acclaimed by
The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Wall Street
Journal. Ninety-two percent of the school's graduates have been accepted
into college preparatory high school programs, and 82 percent -- more
than twice the urban public-school average -- are attending or have
graduated from college.
At the heart of a Community Prep education is the trimesterly parent-student-teacher goal-setting conference -- a
highly successful technique pioneered at Community Prep and now widely employed across the country. At the conferences, students set
lofty goals -- goals that have personal meaning to them -- and, with their teachers and parents, create plans for
achieving those goals.
In the classroom, you find rigorous academics, a teaching style that instills values and self-esteem, community
service (which is required of every student), and family support. Studies integrate reading, writing, math, science
and creative arts. Field trips and experiments predominate. Students keep personal journals to promote writing
skills and free expression. And, Dan's acclaimed "Calculator Club" encourages students to beat the calculator by
performing math functions in their heads.
Dan uses classroom volunteers to help provide the individual attention essential to any student's success. And,
every week he provides teachers with free time to discuss each student's progress.
Now Dan Corley is guiding Community Prep into its third decade. His goal is to share the school's vision and
programs with the broader educational community. As Dan tells his students, if you can dream it, with hard work,
you can make it happen.
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Dr. Robert W. Hahn
Co-founder
Community Preparatory School
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When Dan Corley started dreaming about creating an independent school for the minority and low-income children of
South Providence, the first person he called was his Brown University roommate, Bob Hahn.
At the time, Bob was an economics professor at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University. Today, he is director of
the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies in Washington, D.C., a resident scholar at American Enterprise
Institute, and a research associate at Harvard University.
Bob's expertise in business and economics complemented Dan's knowledge of education and familiarity with the
community. He said if Dan "made educational sense of it," he'd figure out the finances. Bob had no idea if this
dream could become a reality, but he knew that he and Dan had the energy and the willingness to see it through.
With the help of friends, they scraped together a budget of $61,000 and opened Community Preparatory School on
August 20, 1984, with 25 students in three rented classrooms.
Community Prep now serves 150 third through eighth graders in its
permanent home, a former parochial school located in the heart of
South Providence -- a purchase made possible by the $1.8 million capital
campaign completed in 1993, the school's tenth anniversary.
Through it all, Bob has remained one of the school's guiding forces -- albeit often from a distance. Based in
Washington, D.C., Bob has served as a senior staff member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, as well
as a consultant to government and industry on a variety of issues involving regulation and privatization. He is a
frequent contributor to general-interest periodicals and leading scholarly journals, including The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, American Economic Review, and Yale Law Journal. Bob received his bachelor's and master's
degrees in economics from Brown University and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology.
Today, Bob serves as an active member of Community Prep's Board of Trustees, and his dedication to the School is as
strong as on the day it opened. But he believes the school's greatest achievement is yet to come; when it can
demonstrate its ideas and make them transferable to schools across the country.
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