Fifteen years ago, Brian Carty could be found scavenging garbage dumpsters in Manhattan to furnish a small school he was starting. His idea was simple: to create a premier academy for gifted 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade children who would attend regardless of their parents’ ability to pay. In De LaSalle, he created a Dalton for the poor. While far from fancy, the school has been a stunning national success, serving as a model that schools all over the country seek to replicate. Children from the toughest neighborhoods in New York have gone on from De LaSalle to flourish in the elite of the nation’s high schools and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Fordham, Columbia, and NYU. The school has been featured in several national magazines and on CBS Sunday Morning. The kids stay in school studying or working on projects until 6 or 7 every night. Carty himself doesn’t go home until 9 or 10, rising early every morning to welcome the kids to school.

Brian spends summers raising money, doing everything from chasing corporate benefactors to carrying hods as a construction worker. A member of the order of the Christian Brothers of De LaSalle, he is the son of Irish immigrants and grew up on Manhattan’s west side.