Redesigned School Needs Instruments for Student-Driven Exploration Time
My students need starter acoustic guitars to be able to explore interests that are not usually available to them due to their lower socioeconomic status.
I teach and coach at a Title l school where 50% of our students live in poverty. We are diverse. Students from all different backgrounds pile through our doors eager to learn, interact with their peers, and challenge themselves. Our hallways are painted with motivational phrases, and the faces of our students doing the things they love are showcased in photographs lining the walls.
Our mission as a school is to celebrate diversity, cultivate relationships, challenge ourselves and each other, champion excellence in all endeavors, and change the world one person at a time.
Our teachers are committed to helping our students achieve to their potential. We value the importance of creating a school environment where students feel welcome, safe, and are proud to attend.
My Project
Our public school has taken on the task of redesigning what education looks and feels like for our students. Through this process, our school has adopted the mission statement "Empowering all learners to explore" as a way to frame what our redesign will look like. The staff, students, and stakeholders throughout our school believe that education must include more student choice as well as deliberate opportunities for students to develop the social-emotional and community-minded aspects of their character.
In order to do this, our school will be implementing "Exploratory Days" in which direct instruction on basic core concepts (Math, Science, Social Studies, and Language) will be suspended and students will be able to choose programs that develop the other important attributes that form a future-ready person.
These choices have been developed through extensive surveys of stakeholders, and through that process, our underserved student population identified that they would like to develop some of the talents that more affluent students are exposed to regularly. Our school needs 15 starter guitars so that students can be given the opportunity to explore this interest and potentially develop it into a passion that will take them into the future.
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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 Dr. Meyer and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
