Inspiring community involvement in public education is the essence of Once Upon a School. How do we get individuals, who on the surface have no responsibility for the school system, to get involved? Community members must realize that they are already involved (taxes anyone?) and have an additional interest in creating an educated citizenry and workforce. And most importantly, working with students is fun and emotionally satisfying for both adult and child alike.

There is something special about the relationship an outside individual has when working with a student. As 826 puts it:

the average students knows his teacher has to help with his schoolwork, and he knows his parents have to help. But there’s something very new and transformative about meeting a member of the community — a professional journalist, a radio disc jockey, a graduate student, an advertising copywriter, a software developer, a retired lawyer — and have that person give them 2-3 hours of undivided attention. Almost without exception, student achievement and understanding leaps when they are given this concentrated one-on-one attention. Teachers and parents love the help, and the students get to ask a hundred questions until they truly understand a concept.

Joesph Graves, Dean of University Studies and Professor of Biological Studies at North Carolina A&T State University, recently had an editorial on the Greensboro, NC’s news-record.com about how community can enhance local education. His piece details the many ways community can get involved (i.e. tutoring, donations of materials, donations of money). Most importantly, however, is that education should be revered and community members should be pushing to improve education in their district.

The all-state football and basketball players can count on receiving full scholarships to our top state universities, but what about the state chess champions? The state chess champion receives a one-time award from the N.C. Chess Association that isn’t more than $1,000. The University of Texas-Dallas dominates collegiate chess because it gives full scholarships to qualifying chess players. These are students who also major in high-demand mathematics and science areas. Why aren’t we in Guilford County looking to recognize our high achieving academic students in the same way?

Students aspire to be like people who they can see that society rewards. The more alternative careers we expose students to that involve cultivating their intellect, the more we will observe students pursuing those careers.

Tags: community

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Dave Eggers' Wish Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.