My students need 36 USB flash drives to begin the development of college portfolios.
FULLY FUNDED! Mr. Austin's classroom raised $558
This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My Students
I teach in a community challenged by poverty, crime, and lack of opportunity. During the next year, our ninth grade students will begin the long process of getting into college once they finish high school. We want to get them off to a strong start by creating more meaningful personal statements.
Our school is in a low-income part of a very large city.
The school has long had a terrible reputation for being under-performing, overrun by gangs, and generally not serving our students. However, I am part of a group of teachers who are looking to change the way education works in our city, state, and country. We have been given the opportunity to take our already successful program and expand it to further serve our students. During the next four years, these students will not only take a rigorous curriculum including Math, English, Social Studies, Science, and Languages, but they will be given the opportunity that students all over the country are losing – they will be able to see the connection between these subjects through interdisciplinary teaching AND they will get to process their learning through three plus years of art instruction. We hope to provide this largely low-income group of mostly Latino students with the education that they deserve and have a right to.
My Project
Our new program is taking on the challenge of getting every single one of our students into a four-year college or university. These flash drives will be the first step in helping them face this challenge. During their first year in our program, students will begin developing a portfolio of university material – personal statements, goals, entrance requirements, graduation checklists, letters of recommendation, etc. We want them to create more authentic and more powerful reflections on the change they see in themselves as students over the four-years in our program. Imagine the personal statements that they will be able to submit to colleges during their senior years after working on them for over three years! Many of these students do not have computers and/or printers at home. These flash drives will serve as a storage place for all of the work that they do in looking toward that dream of higher education. They will be worth more than gold to our students.
The number one challenge facing our education system is not bad teachers, overcrowded classrooms, or low test scores – it is poverty.
Our students need to understand that there are people out there that care about them. We need to help them break the cycle, to smash the achievement gap. These flash drives will not only serve as a simple device to store their hard work, but will also show them that the dream of college is possible for them and that there are people who want them to succeed.
More than three‑quarters of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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