Imagine being 19 years old, without a high school diploma, and unable to read your job application...these are the challenges that a typical student faces in my school. My job as the literacy specialist is to provide literacy support for high school students, ages 16-22.
My students are gang-bangers, teen moms, and high school dropouts.
However, they have all taken a second chance at getting their high school diploma and passing their state-mandated standardized test. It is not an easy challenge, and they have to overcome many economic problems before they can even begin to think of their academic problems, but they are trying. As the literacy specialist, I work with students from ages 16-22 and provide literacy support for them. We do typical reading assignments, such as novels and short stories, but I also incorporate informational text - the newspaper, user manuals, and magazines, among others, because these students need to see the authentic value in knowing how to read and understand. I also use projects as an alternative to traditional writing assignments to let students showcase some of their other talents, such as drawing and painting.
My Project
By donating to this project, students will have the basic supplies that we are using up every day in our building. Several of my students like to create projects and posters to decorate the halls and walls, so the posterboard and construction paper will be used for that. As I try to increase their vocabulary knowledge, we are in need of dictionaries (unfortunately, we only have one to share between 40 students) and notebooks to write down our new words and their meanings in context. I bring in informational text so that students can see the purpose in reading, and they would thoroughly enjoy the Current Events subscription. The last two resources are to help me help the students, by providing quick comprehension questions and short assessments. These two resources leave me more time to work directly with students instead of having to take more time to design these from scratch.
My students are not your typical high schoolers - many of them have tattoos, arrest records, and their own children.
They sell drugs and swear at their parents. The difference between them and hoodlums is that my students are trying to earn their high school diploma. We give them a second chance at my school and these students are taking advantage of it. Every day is a challenge, but every day they rise to meet it and some will overcome it with your gracious donation. Thank you.
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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