Once summer starts, Commonwealth’s stately old building sits sleepy and quiet—until just after the Fourth of July. Then stairwells once again rumble with feet running to class and giggles echo up from the Cafegymnatorium during lunch. Dive In Commonwealth is now in session.

Founded in 2019 for driven, bright students from low-income backgrounds, Dive In is not your typical “summer school.” Rather, students commit to up to twenty-seven months of rigorous classes and enrichment activities through six-week-long summer sessions and Saturdays throughout the academic years leading up to high school. In particular, Dive In is designed to help bridge the opportunity gap for students and families interested in independent schools like Commonwealth, burnishing their academic skills and assisting with the application process. With ingenuity, institutional support, and old-fashioned pounding-the-pavement, Dive In has grown from five students its first summer to thirty-seven students this year, a new record.

Here, Dive In Director and Commonwealth Mandarin teacher Rui Shu, Assistant Director Paul Brunick ‘02, and Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 reflect on the program’s thoughtful growth and their hopes for its future.

What does the typical summer day at Dive In look like for students? For you as administrators?

Paul Brunick: Our first class is at 9:00 a.m., but students tend to arrive starting at 8:00 a.m. because they like to have social time with each other. The kids are super curious and engaged. They’ve always done the reading, and they often come in with a lot of questions. They’re very willing to express their skepticism about things we’ve read.

The core academic classes are in the morning—that’s English and math, plus dedicated writing classes and some test prep. After lunch, we have a rotation of arts, sports, and elective classes in different humanities or STEM-related topics. Then we cap off our week with a Friday field trip.

Jennifer Borman: The building feels joyful. If I go down [to the Cafegymnatorium at lunchtime, there’s a bunch of kids playing chess, maybe they’re telling jokes or laughing. If I walk by a classroom, I see the same high levels of engagement. These kids are full of life, full of energy, full of giggles. There’s a lot of enthusiasm. It’s delightful. I sometimes think to myself, you know, how lucky am I that I get to hear their laughter every day?

Rui Shu: From an administrative standpoint, we have faculty meetings once every two weeks, and we meet with individual students to go over their grades and comments, or with their parents. My work also depends on what we need: I cover study halls, or I might monitor lunch or recess. I chaperone a few trips. I take attendance…

JB: Rui is being modest! Yes, you do all those nuts-and-bolts things, but you also meaningfully look at what we’re providing students, and then, holistically, make program shifts to do an even better job.

Rui also does a fair amount of sitting in on classes, and as a result of that sort of care and attention, makes sure our pedagogy and our classes truly meet the needs of middle-school students, both in terms of who we’re hiring and in terms of the insights we glean and then mirror back.

PB: Rui gives lots of great, concrete, actionable feedback on classes, which I really appreciate. She’s allowed our teachers to have creative and intellectual freedom while also building a more comprehensive throughline for the whole program. She’s a teachers’ teacher.

Besides that joyful atmosphere, what drew you to Dive In?

RS: I started with Dive In by teaching a Mandarin course for two weeks. I had a lot of fun teaching middle schoolers; they’re much younger than my Commonwealth students, but they’re equally enthusiastic. When I teach Mandarin to Commonwealth students, they obviously make really rewarding progress, but I think Dive In makes an even bigger impact on the students’ life trajectory. I was really impressed by their engagement and their commitment to furthering their education. So that’s been really, really meaningful.

PB: I was working in art journalism, and at the same time, I was volunteering as a mentor with young people, so teaching was just a way for me to combine those two domains. I still get to stay engaged with the world of arts and letters and share my intellectual interests, but then also be part of a community. I find it a particularly rewarding crossover.

JB: I would say my whole career has been about wanting young people to become empowered and grow into their potential, and I’ve always had a connection to doing that work with students who haven’t had those opportunities fall into their lap. For me, Dive In is an important way that Commonwealth does that work—not the only way, but an important way—and it was certainly a draw in my coming here [in 2021].

The Dive In kids are just fantastic young people, curious and ambitious in all the ways Commonwealth students are curious and ambitious; in many cases, they just don’t have access to the kinds of opportunities that many of our Commonwealth students have had all their lives. Commonwealth is a more educational and more impactful school if we are serving all different kinds of students, and the Dive In students who have joined our community have added so much to the range of perspectives and identities in the building. We are lucky when they choose to come here.

So far, twelve students have matriculated at Commonwealth from Dive In. What does that journey look like—to Commonwealth or other schools? How do we support students through the admissions process and after they enroll here?

RS: Well, it starts the summer before eighth grade, as we have SSAT [Secondary School Admission Test] preparation, so that’s a huge part of it. Students can take the SSAT twice for free. And then during the Dive In Saturday sessions in the fall, we do mock admissions interviews with students and parents who want to apply not only to Commonwealth but other private schools. We’ll help with filling out and navigating all the application platforms online, too. After students are admitted to schools, we reach out again to prepare them, like if they need any help in terms of picking a school or negotiating a financial aid package or things like that.

We also meet with Carrie Healy [Commonwealth’s Director of Admissions and Financial Aid] and the admissions team. They have great knowledge about the schools around this area, so they can recommend other schools if families are interested. That way, if students apply to Commonwealth and they don’t get in or they’re waitlisted, they have other options, just in case, and we communicate that with parents. And, obviously, the parents have the final say about where they want their children to apply.

JB: In terms of supporting students once they arrive here, I think our Dive In students often encounter many of the same challenges as their peers: How do I manage all this homework? How do I tackle a project or a test that seems too hard for me? The majority of ninth graders—and I don’t just mean Dive In students—at one point or other feel out of their depth here. These are all kids who have generally done exceptionally well in school, wherever their school was, and, almost inevitably, they will hit a class or a task or a situation here where they’re like, “Oh, this is really hard.” And that can be scary in all kinds of ways.

In addition to all the ways we would support any student who feels like they’re struggling or out of their depth, Dive In students have a bit of a running start because they know the building. They know some familiar faces—not just Rui and Paul, but Mr. Letarte, Mr. Samblas, and Ms. Sundberg [Commonwealth math, English, and biology teachers, respectively]. They know each other; our goal is to always enroll a cohort of students from Dive In, so they have some friends built into that support system. But I do think the scariness of adjusting to the demands of high school and feeling like maybe you’re not fully up to it are a little more acute if you’re coming to an environment that’s more privileged. It can feel like a steeper hill for some students, even though everybody’s climbing that same hill. We adults in the building are all pretty attuned to that and asking ourselves, How do we help kids who are coming into a school where not everybody shares their background? What can we do to provide extra support?

RS: Our admissions team does a great job pairing students with advisors for all incoming students, but because they know Dive In kids a bit better, it’s even more intentional.

We’re also tweaking the Dive In curriculum— for example, having rising ninth graders take biology and writing, instead of more generic courses, to get them ready for Biology 1 and English 9 at Commonwealth. The classes are taught by Ms. Sundberg and [Commonwealth English teacher] Ms. Tyson, who are likely to teach those students when they’re here, so they will already know the Dive In students when they arrive.

This summer, Mr. Williams [Commonwealth’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] will be teaching a humanities course and serving as a class advisor for one of the cohorts. He will also lead a few field trips to get to know kids from a different perspective as well. He was part of the admissions events for them this year, so he’s already met a lot of the parents, too.

JB: We also have Dive In alums come back and serve as teaching assistants to current Dive In students, and that creates, I think, a really nice sense of mentorship and support.

Dive In has grown from five to thirty-seven students since its founding in 2019. What has driven that growth, and how have you managed it?

JB: One way we’ve grown was by adding a sixth-grade cohort a few years ago; that’s been a lot more work, but it was the right way to go, because it became clear that starting with rising seventh graders wasn’t giving us and them enough time to get ready for the rigor of a school like Commonwealth. Though we will certainly still admit rising seventh-graders when it makes sense.

We’ve also grown our budget. One of my big jobs with Dive In is finding the funds to support the plans and programs we want to offer. Every year, it’s an increased commitment from Commonwealth to make sure we’re doing this good work, and we have the resources to do this good work, including supporting students through financial aid and other grants for all four years if they enroll here.

It hasn’t been an accident that Dive In keeps growing. It’s been deeply intentional work—a program development cycle of trying new strategies, assessing what works, and making further adjustments so we can grow in steady, careful ways and make sure we are offering a great experience. Every year, in terms of size and money and outreach and curriculum and instruction, we’ve been trying to be better and more impactful.

PB: We rely a lot on sending schools and organizations [such as St. Peter School, Mother Caroline Academy, and many METCO schools] to generate referrals, and, over the years, those relationships have been sustained and continue to pay dividends. And as we build new ones and expand our network, we’ve gotten more and more viable applicants every year. We were originally looking to enroll twelve students per cohort this summer, but we had so many kids we didn’t want to cut loose that we ended up expanding to fifteen. We always want to find ways to extend the impact of the program while holding on to its close-knit, family-like feel, so we’re going to try to perfect the size we’re at before we expand in other directions.

RS: A lot of that relationship building is also with our current students and their families. Many of them refer their friends and family—we have a lot of cousins! And I think that, because those students have good experiences here, their middle school teachers and school administrations may want to recommend more students to us. That’s also very important.

PB: We’re always looking for ways to connect. We decided to go school to school, neighborhood by neighborhood. Rui started sending handwritten notes to principals, guidance counselors, and family liaisons at various schools, and I did a little tour on my bicycle, dropping off packets of translated flyers with goodie bags to really try to break through the noise of people’s inboxes and get their attention. We got a lot of great referrals that way.

Speaking of family ties, at least three Commonwealth alumnae aunties have referred their nieces to Dive In! How else has Commonwealth’s alumni/ae network supported the program?

RS: Like it takes a village to raise a kid, it takes a village to support these students as well. We work with Alisha Elliott ’01 [Commonwealth’s Director of Advancement] to email alums, or they hear about opportunities through the Commonwealth newsletter and they reach out to us. We had great experience last summer working with the alumni/ae who either taught a class or chaperoned field trips [Ellie Laabs ’17, Jordan Dowd ’17, Ayla Denenberg ’23, and Alec Bode Mathur ’20]. They already know Commonwealth, they know the building, they know our culture, they know our goal. So it’s really nice to have them support Dive In.

JB: Alumni/ae, parents, and friends also gave generously to help launch Dive In six years ago. The program continues to inspire and rely on such generosity, and we are deeply grateful for those commitments.

What are your hopes and plans for the future of Dive In?

PB: To create a more comprehensive curricular throughline for the whole program and make sure all of our classes are working towards the same goals and are coordinated with each other—that’s our focus this year. And, with our bigger enrollment, we also want to make sure we still provide individualized guidance to each student. That’s meant hiring more classroom teachers so Rui and I can dedicate more time to family engagement and homework help in Study Halls.

RS: We also want to further diversify our applicant pool for Dive In. We’re always trying to find new ways to attract more students from different backgrounds. And we’re trying to diversify our teaching pool as well, to have more teachers of color to better reflect the students, who are mostly students of color. We tried some new things this year, like directly emailing all English and humanity teachers in Boston public and charter schools inviting them to apply for our open summer positions.

PB: Commonwealth’s admissions office has always been apt at spotting young talent that have overperformed their circumstances—like being able to read test scores against educational background in a holistic way. But I think it’s great that Commonwealth has taken this huge next step of extending those enrichment opportunities more widely. Dive In is designed to help level the playing field, so these students can grow to their full potential before they even start high school and aren’t stuck making up for lost time relative to their peers. Like what Jennifer was saying about Commonwealth’s commitment to these students—I think it’s really meaningful.

JB: Well, one of my hopes is that every year Commonwealth enrolls a good number of Dive In participants, that they feel like they have a real presence here at every grade level, and that they feel well served by being here and are able to make the most of what we offer for their own hopes and dreams. That’s my big aspiration, and we’re certainly on our way.

This article originally appeared in the summer 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.

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