My students need donations to help go to France and Spain for a Spring Break trip that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. All the organizational particulars are taken care of, we simply need your generous help with the funding.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
I am a French teacher in a inner city school high school. I teach all four years of high school so my students have a wide range of ages from 14 to 19. We are a high school that is literally located in the heart of the ghetto, with gun shots fired in front of our school as the students were being let out for the day just a few weeks ago. We are classified as a general education high school. Needless to say, we are in a very high-need environment where most of the residents around our school live just at or below the poverty line. Around 15% of our population are effectively homeless.
Our students are faced with violence and despair every day. While they technically know there are nice things in this world, they normally don't get a chance to experience them for longer than a couple hours on the rare occasions they get to experience them at all. Most of our classes are over crowded and our test scores are abysmal not to mention that we have less than half the students that start as freshmen graduate from our school in four years. Our freshmen class has approximately 250 students while our senior class has 60 students.
The prospect of staying in decent hotels (many, if not most of which, will probably be in better conditions than the homes of these students) and experiencing more than a week of what I have called an out-of-ghetto experience will be a first time for nearly all of the students going. The solution to their plight is showing them that it doesn't have to be this way for them. Even harder than that, is making them believe it. That is why cutting them off from where they came from and just flooding the students with what could be for more than a week straight works so well. It switches on the part of their brain that dares to dream through an inescapable volume of culture and experience. It is through this kind of vessel that we can give them the advantage they need in college. The drop out rate of students like ours from major universities is something freakishly high like 90%. These types of experiences for students like ours have cut that number in half and some studies show improvements even greater than that.
You have my word that you will be directly contributing to the turning point in the lives of the majority of the ten students going, if not all ten. This trip will be that moment when they finally believe with all their heart that there is more to life than the ghetto they came from. And the studies about this exact phenomenon bear out exactly what I am telling you now. This is the lift off point for their imaginations as well as their spirit. And such a thing is the very best ammunition we, as teachers, can give them going into college or a university.
Paris, Provence and Barcelona
(t will be an all inclusive trip going to Paris, France then Provence and then Barcelona. This includes all transportation, most of the food, lodging and most of the museum/attraction costs.)
10 students and 2 teachers
$26,888.00
Trip cost
$26,888.00
Vendor shipping charges
FREE
Sales tax
$0.00
3rd party payment processing fee
$403.32
Fulfillment labor & materials
$9.00
Total project cost
$27,300.32
Suggested donation to help DonorsChoose reach more classrooms
$5,992.75
Total project goal
$33,293.07
How we calculate what's needed
Total project goal
$33,293.07
161 Donors
-$15,212.77
Donations toward project cost
-$13,650.16
Donations to help DonorsChoose reach more classrooms
-$1,562.61
match offer
-$16,646.54
Match offer toward project cost
-$13,650.16
Match offer to help DonorsChoose reach more classrooms
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mr. Maille and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.