Thank you for taking the time to learn more about our school.

Downtown Magnets High School is an outstanding, globally minded school that provides students a nurturing and supportive environment with high academic expectations and high achievement. Our primary goal is to ensure every one of our students becomes STELLAR (Scholars, Technologically Savvy, Effective Communicators, Leaders, Life-long Learners, Aware, Responsible) over the course their four years with us. A STELLAR student is not someone who only tests well, but is a person who will positively contribute to the community, who can challenge an argument, who cares about the consequences of an action, who embraces the differences among us, and who has a love of learning.

I am fortunate to work with a faculty that works tirelessly to improve their professional practice and support of student learning as evidenced by our year after year improvement in test scores, graduation rates, and four-year college attendance rates. We are proud to have the highest high school Academic Performance Index (API) in LAUSD’s Local District 4 for three years running, and our goal is pass to 800 in the next year.

We have continued to devote our efforts to developing our robust Magnet career pathways in business, electronic information, and fashion. Students learn 21^st Century skills to prepare themselves to enter a workforce that demands effective communication, collaboration, and creativity. We give students the opportunity to experience work-based learning, and we are excited to start working with an advisory board that will include community partners from Bank of America, Verizon Wireless, KPMG LLP, Microsoft, the City of Los Angeles, Xerox, Los Angeles City College, and others. We currently receive over $200,000 in grant money annually for our three academies, and we have had ongoing professional development for all of our teachers to enrich the interdisciplinary connections necessary for relevant and rigorous learning. We are proud to add engineering as an additional STEM pathway for the 2011-2012 school year, giving our students yet another option in preparing to be both career and college ready when they graduate Downtown Magnets High School.

We also have a vibrant advanced placement (AP) and honors program that now includes a ninth grade AP Human Geography option and a wide range of choices throughout a student's four-year stay here. We make an effort to give all of our students the opportunity to take one or more of these courses, and we have shown marked improvement in our pass rates in recent years, including a 96% pass rate on last year's AP United States History test.

As we embark on the new school year, I invite all DMHS parents to actively be engaged in the education of your child and participate in events at our school. If you are visiting our website to learn more about our school, I invite you to stop by and learn more about the stellar learning experience we offer our students at DMHS. Our school has an incredibly warm and welcoming family culture, and our DMHS parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents are all an integral part of it. I value your input to help make DMHS an even better place for the education of students, and I welcome and encourage your involvement and feedback in making our school the best in all of LAUSD.

Please feel free to contact me by email at bic0924@lausd.net or by phone at 213-481-0371.

Brandon Cohen

Principal