I teach at a public charter school in Crown Heights that serves 400 phenomenal Black and/or Latino students, 75% of whom qualify for Free or Reduced Lunch.
Esther is one of the amazing students who participates on our Speech Team. Two years ago, she was my first student in seven years to try one of the hardest categories in Speech, Extemporaneous Speaking. In Extemp, students are given a question on current events and they have 30 minutes to prepare their answer before they stand in front of a judge and deliver a seven-minute speech without notes. Through her hard work, Esther has become one of the top extempers in the state and has even done well at national tournaments. Next year, she will be helping me teach a class of kids who want to follow in her footsteps as extempers.
Our students are some of the only kids who attend an inner-city school competing on the national circuit in two of the most intense categories offered in Speech & Debate: Extemp and Student Congress. And even though our Extemp and Congress programs are under two years old, our kids have grown tremendously, placing at both local and national tournaments this year, and that's WITHOUT enough computers to go around. It's time to invest in them to see what they can do with the same access to technology that other, wealthier programs have.
It breaks my heart when students are unable to conduct research because they don't know "what to Google" - these Chromebooks will enhance the kids' ability to conduct research as they learn how to successfully navigate major periodicals about issues in current events. These Chromebooks will also enable them to collaborate better with each other, since they will be delegating who researches what to prepare for tournaments.
In Their Own Words
I want to make sure my team is as prepared as possible. Laptops are incredibly useful to save articles that we need for our local and national competitions. Laptops are much more convenient for our team because the alternative would be carrying boxes and boxes of paper articles to and from tournaments. We use special software to download thousands of articles on the one or two laptops we share, but our team is getting bigger, so huddling around the few that we have is no longer possible. We will not be able to crowd around one laptop like before. Many of us cannot afford to get laptops for ourselves, but I firmly believe that money should not hinder our ability to do just as well as everyone else.
As soon as my teammates see that we have a better way to compete, others will want to join the team too! There is no other team in our school that pushes kids as hard as the Speech and Debate Team, so the captains want to make sure our teammates are well taken care of, and we will be able to do that by giving laptops to top competitors. Others will see that hard work is rewarded and will want to compete just as well as the top competitors. Getting these laptops will be an amazing recruiting tactic for future students who wish to join the team.
Getting laptops for the team has always been a top priority for us. We are a new team that is just becoming accustomed to competing every weekend, so having laptops will help us become better competitors. Many of us cannot bring our laptops to every competition because we simply do not have laptops. Our school’s population is 99% Black and Hispanic and mostly students who come from a low-income family. Our school is trying to send as many students of color to college as possible, but there are many more barriers our Speech and Debate Team is also trying to fix. In most Speech and Debate circuits, white students make up the majority of the participants. The competitions already take a toll on us, as a team, because we are often the only team of color competing that day, so having these laptops will help us be prepared in ways competitors who look like us are just not.
More than half 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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