Send Teams Harvard and Stanford to our Nation's Capital!

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.

I teach American History to an incredible group of gifted 8th graders in East Oakland, CA. (Each of my classes is named after an excellent university, hence "Team Harvard" and "Team Stanford.") As a culminating adventure to our study of American History and to our two years together--when my students were in 7th grade, I was their teacher, too!--I will be taking 25 of them to Washington, DC from June 8-12, 2005. While in our nation's capital, we will do many exciting things. Our itinerary includes a night-tour of the monuments, and visits to the Smithsonians, Mount Vernon, the Capitol Building, the National Archives, the Supreme Court, Ford's Theater, and the International Spy Museum. Other highlights include a guided tour of Howard University (they already had a tour of Stanford University last year!), and a trip to the Holocaust Museum, which will be especially poignant after their 7th grade month-long intensive study of global genocides. We will be traveling with a group called Educational Tours, and this company will arrange everything for us. All we have to do is raise the money, and we have been hard at work since November doing just that. In fact, we have raised OVER TWO THIRDS OF THE FUNDS through numerous candy sales during school lunches, bake sales (which included tamales, flan, and sweet potato pies), a fundraiser called "Scratch and Help", a teacher-organized fundraising party, and a raffle of locally donated items such as a helicopter ride in the ABC affiliate's TrafficWatch Helicopter. Additionally, twelve students wrote grants to the Marcus Foster Foundation's Children and Youth Grants program, and each of them was awarded a partial scholarship to help cover the cost of his/her trip. Some students have even taken on after-school jobs to raise money for their trip! Private donors and foundations have also been amazingly supportive to our cause. (We have solicited our Oakland councilmembers as well as the City Administrator, but both offices have declined our requests for funding.) Although the students and I have worked tirelessly over the past five months to raise over two-thirds of the cost of our trip, we still need your help! I have the honor of teaching a group of students who are simply wonderful young adults. The relationship that we have is like family; my pride in their academic success over the past two years is a pride that I can only imagine compares to a parent's pride in his/her children. Yet because of the fact that my students come from low-income families (many of my students have never been on an airplane), this opportunity is not one that is easily afforded to them. Experiential learning is the best possible type of education. Please help my scholars culminate their junior high school experience by EXPERIENCING our curriculum... by experiencing our nation's capital. Thank you!