My students need lamps, supplies, and furniture to create a modern, collaborative, creative and accessible learning environment for us to pilot our Butler SOLE program.
Are we able to leverage the natural curiosity of students with technology to achieve deep learning? We need you to help us take our classroom to the school in the cloud and establish the Butler SOLE project as a model for 21st century education.
Our students are a randomly chosen group of 9-12th graders at a low income high school in our community.
Our school is one of five high schools in our district. Of those schools we are the smallest with an enrollment of approximately 630 students, 85% of which are on the free and reduced lunch program. Our school receives Title I funding and has been classified as failing for a number of years. We also have the lowest graduation rate in the city. Our students are way behind in both math and English scores. That said, our students are capable of competing with top students in our district and state. They just need to be given the resources, the right opportunity, and encouragement. Our students want to improve and are fully capable of doing amazing things. Through this program, we want to give our students a state of the art learning and working environment that will allow them to reach their potential.
My Project
We want our students to think outside of the box and take charge of their own learning. To do this, they need furniture (tables and chairs) that can be moved easily and freely to enhance collaboration. We want this to feel like a real work environment where groups can meet and discuss the research question we give them and then move to collaborate with other groups. They need office and art supplies so that they can create different ways to track, express, and demonstrate their learning. We want our students to be able to pursue knowledge with each other and express it using their strengths. With the resources we are requesting, our students will be able to capitalize on their own curiosity and push themselves to learn in new and innovative ways. We want to base our workspace on innovative, modern workspaces of companies like Google and Facebook.
Our students come from a low-income and low-performing school.
We want to show our students, and community, that a lack of resources will not hold our students back. They can leverage their own curiosity to teach themselves and create knowledge. These are skills that will break our students out of a struggling system and allow them to explore all they are capable of. We want to show, not only that our students are capable of learning, but that they are capable of changing education.
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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. Melkote and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.