The good Cornellians can do: Debra Stern ’87

After the Mount Vernon (New York) school district cut funding for arts programs from their budget in the 1990s, Debra Stern ’87 and her family moved to a neighboring community. But she didn’t stop there. Debra and her husband began the process of founding a new charter school in Mount Vernon—one that would offer arts and other enrichment programs to its students.

Debra now serves as executive director of the Amani Public Charter School in Mount Vernon, New York, which opened in 2011. She’s proud of the school’s offerings—music, dance, languages like Latin, sports, and more. Debra says that the school’s mission is to make these programs accessible to any person, in the tradition of Ezra Cornell’s founding vision for Cornell.

In addition to Debra, the school’s board includes four fellow Cornellians: John Kuo ’85, Sondra WuDunn ’87, Paul Morenberg ’87, and Max Smith ’00.

“Through our work together, we demonstrate that Ezra Cornell's founding principles remain as relevant and powerful as ever,” Debra says. “When I walk through Amani's halls and see our students thriving, I'm reminded that this is precisely what it means ‘to do the greatest good’—creating educational opportunities that transform not just individual lives, but entire communities.”

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