Ringing in the New Year

UrbanFUTURE will be ringing in the New Year this coming Monday. Why are we celebrating the New Year at the start of August? Because it will mark the start of the 2010-11 fiscal year, which comes with great anticipation and excitement.

To kick of the New Year, UrbanFUTURE will be welcoming 9 new program staff members to our ranks. This group of very talented individuals come from AmeriCorps, Teach for America and Jesuit Volunteer Corps. We have former school teachers and camp directors. Some of the new program staff will be replacing staff at Fanning and others will be headed to expansion sites to begin the acculturation process with parents, teachers and students.

As part of the New Year "festivities", there will be a staff retreat in Perryville, Missouri. With the near doubling of our staff, this will be a great opportunity for people to get to know one another and to set the tone as as staff for the entire year. A big focus of the retreat will be on leadership and helping each staff member grow as a leader during the year.

We are looking forward to the best year UrbanFUTURE has ever had in 2010-11. We hope you share our enthusiasm for the upcoming year, and we hope to see many old and new faces this fall as programming gets under way.

How You Can Help

UrbanFUTURE is gearing up for a very exciting school year this fall. After last week's successful interview weekend, we are getting ready to welcome new Team Leaders to the organization in August to begin the acculturation process at new school sites.

We have been hitting the volunteer recruiting trail hard at local cafes, major corporations, farmers' markets and outdoor concerts. We expect to be doubling our volunteer corps for the upcoming year from 200-250 to 400-500.

Finally, we're finalizing our development plans for the start of the new fiscal year on August 1st. This October, we will be conducting our first ever volunteer-driven campaign to raise money and referrals. In conjunction with the campaign, UrbanFUTURE will be holding its inaugural trivia night in November.

With so much happening at UrbanFUTURE, now, more than ever, we need your support. There are several ways you can help us out. You can sign up to volunteer as a tutor or mentor. Tutors and mentors spend an hour a week with a student at one of our school sites. Tutors focus on helping student's with homework and helping them improve their grades. Mentors work with students on goal-setting, character development and literacy. Click here to learn more about becoming a tutor or mentor and fill out an application.

If you are unable to volunteer one hour each week, but you would still like to help out, UrbanFUTURE is getting ready to start a "Friends of"-type group. This group will help to promote UrbanFUTURE, assist with fundraising events, make calls to thank donors and advocate for UrbanFUTURE whenever and wherever possible. For those interested in getting involved in this group, please call Tim Weiss at (314)776-3434 or e-mail tim@urbanfuturestl.org.

You can also help us simply by connecting UrbanFUTURE with your family and friends, who might be open to learning more about UrbanFUTURE. One of the best ways UrbanFUTURE can expand its reach in the St. Louis community is by utilizing the networks of current supporters. This will help grow our base exponentially. Referrals can be sent to tim@urbanfuturestl.org.

Finally, we always need financial support. UrbanFUTURE provides its INSPIRE, IMPACT and Explore! programs at no cost to the school district or the students and families who participate in them. For only $10, a student is able to meet with a tutor for one week. $50 covers the cost for a student to participate in the Explore! program for 1 month. For $250 a student will be able to meet with a tutor for one semester. $500 will pay for a student to meet with a mentor for one quarter. $3,000 will cover the cost for a student to participate in INSPIRE, IMPACT and Explore for the entire year. To make a donation to UrbanFUTURE, you can do so online or by mailing your donation to:

UrbanFUTURE
3145 S. Grand Ave.
Ste. A
St. Louis, MO 63118

If you have any questions about making a gift to UrbanFUTURE, please contact Tim Weiss at tim@urbanfuturestl.org or (314)776-3434.

We appreciate your continued support of UrbanFUTURE's efforts to close the achievement gap. Together we are helping urban youth see and believe in their possibilities!

UrbanFUTURE's Solution to Eliminating the Academic Achievement Gap

The following post is text from a recent grant request that UrbanFUTURE submitted for the Bank of America Neighborhood Builder's program. This represents UrbanFUTURE's strategy and vision for solving the academic achievement gap in urban schools.

Poverty is an age-old problem in our nation’s urban communities. In order to solve this problem, the educational achievement gap must be bridged—one community cluster at a time. UF defines the community cluster according to the public school system’s geographical zoning. Each “community cluster” revolves around a hub middle school and the elementary schools that feed it. Utilizing the community cluster approach, UF reaches every school-aged child in a given zip code who shares a common educational path.

Once the cluster is defined, UF approaches supplemental education by recognizing the isolation that exists between three primary groups – the home, the school and the community. Our key initiative is the UrbanFUTURE Restoration Model, which seeks to repair the traditional bonds between home, school, and community that poverty has broken. UF staff brokers these connections and is housed within the school building, allowing the school to serve as a center for these groups to connect through our innovative mentoring and tutoring programs. Through this community-cluster based restoration model, we are addressing generational poverty at individual, institutional and community-wide levels.

The primary objective of the Restoration Model is to ensure that 4th through 8th grade students possess the academic acumen to master high school as well as the mindset to see and believe in their possibilities. To achieve this vision, UF focuses on five key outcomes: literacy, academic growth, character formation, parental involvement, and career preparation. The combination of these focal points creates a formula for success in eliminating the achievement gap.

This is what UrbanFUTURE believes will solve the academic achievement gap and in turn help communities out of poverty.

How to Fit Science & Social Studies

There is ongoing debate in the education community on how much emphasis should be placed on reading and math at under-performing schools at the expense of science and social studies. This article from the Post-Dispatch highlights the frustration of one teacher at Fanning over the scaling back of science and social studies classes so students who are below grade level in reading and math can get caught up.

UrbanFUTURE has recognized this issue in putting together its IMPACT tutoring curriculum. On the one hand, students need strong vocabulary, comprehension, critical thinking and logical reasoning skills to fully grasp topics in science and social studies. On the other hand, removing these subjects completely, robs students of opportunities to learn about the world they live in and have an understanding of why things are the way they are.

To combat this issue, UrbanFUTURE is working to embed science and social studies topics into reading and math activities that students complete with IMPACT tutors. This will help students learn about gravity or ancient Egyptian culture, while building vocabulary, comprehension and critical thinking skills. In fact, UrbanFUTURE has learned that this is exactly how some of the teachers cover science and social studies topics in their classroom and embedding these lessons into reading, writing and math.

As a way to further enhance the student's experience with science and social studies, UrbanFUTURE is using its Explore! program to take kids on field trips that will introduce them to professionals in science and social studies fields. These field trips will give kids hands-on opportunities and create excitement in career fields in science and social studies.

UrbanFUTURE would like to thank Monsanto for providing funding to expand our IMPACT curriculum into science and help cover the cost of these field trips. Its funders like Monsanto that help more students have opportunities to grow in all academic areas so they can see and believe in their possibilities!

Summer Vacation....Hardly

School may be out for summer, but UrbanFUTURE is still hard at work. What goes on during the hot and humid summer months at UrbanFUTURE? The answer is A LOT!

The beginning of the summer is filled with data. UrbanFUTURE spends the month of June collecting student data from the school year, compiling it and analyzing it. By the end of June, the analyzed data is put into a that we give to the St. Louis Public Schools.

We also hit the recruiting trail hard during the summer months. You may have even seen us at one of the many Kaldi's locations around the area on Saturday mornings. You may see us at various outdoor concert events donning our "I Am" t-shirts, encouraging people to volunteer as tutors and mentors for the upcoming school year.

With so many new people wanting to volunteer, we have a lot of training that needs to get done before school starts in August. Team Leaders have been working hard to refine the mentor and tutor training so volunteers are better prepared for the rigors of being an UrbanFUTURE volunteer. New trainings will start in July. In addition to fine-tuning the training, Team Leaders are busy making modifications to the mentoring and tutoring curriculum based on the feedback of our current tutors and mentors and will unveil the new curriculum to volunteers during training.

UrbanFUTURE's expansion plans have also had us in hiring mode. Over 125 individuals applied for the Team Leader position during the one month window. Staff have been logging long hours conducting phone interviews trying to find the best candidates. The final round of interviews will come over the weekend of July 9th, and final decisions will be made the next week.

Finally, development staff has stayed busy writing and submitting proposals to foundations, meeting with potential donors and working with volunteers for the annual campaign in the fall. Also being planned is an UrbanFUTURE trivia night, "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" style. This will be the first such event for UrbanFUTURE!

So while some might think that things slow down in summer, UrbanFUTURE knows things are speeding along just fine.

Parent Leadership As a Solution

In Wednesday's St. Louis Post Dispatch, this story ran about the plight of under-performing schools in the St. Louis area. While the story has relevance to UrbanFUTURE's work in eliminating the achievement gap in the urban core, it is a string within some of the comments from readers that really resonates with what we are doing. Here a just a few of the comments.

"It does not matter what you do to the school. If education is not valued in the home; these schools will not perform at the level of districts with an educated parent population that stress the importance of lifelong learning." - w. champion

"As others have commented, educational failure is not all on the teachers. If parents* don't care at the original school, why would they suddenly care when their offspring is put in a new "high achieving" school?" - crissyboo

"That's right, champion: the success of the school depends on the commitment of the family....Most of my students NEVER hear the words, "is your homework finished?" or "Have you raised your grade up to a "B" in History?". These and the countless other words of encouragement from PARENTS make the difference in whether I, the student, will re-read the chapter, or re-write the essay, or review my class notes." - LGL

The last comment comes directly from a self-identified, St. Louis Public School teacher. These comments highlight exactly what UrbanFUTURE identifies as the key to helping students in under-resourced communities achieve: engage the parent as a leader.

That's why UrbanFUTURE requires parents and mentors to speak on a weekly basis to discuss goals, achievements, challenges. It's why UrbanFUTURE staff hold meetings for parents to learn the things they can do to help their child by working with them at home. It's why we ask parents to get involved at their child's school and stop by to see their daughter or son's teacher, not just at conferences, but throughout the year.

These things happen where resources are, but in areas where resources are lacking, the family is isolated from the community and the school. The Restoration Model provides a construct for parents to connect with teachers, community volunteers and each other. At UrbanFUTURE, we share in the sentiment of some of these commenters, because we know parent leadership is a major part of the remedy in turning around under-performing schools and re-invigorating neighborhoods.

Note: UrbanFUTURE does not endorse comments made on the highlighted article that are of a divisive nature. We only wish to comment on a common theme around parents' role in solving the issue of failing schools.

Letter from a Student

Below is an unedited letter from an UrbanFUTURE student to the staff at Fanning.

Dear UrbanFUTURE staff,

I just want to say thank you for helping me to be a better person in school and in the world. I’ve learned how a lot of stuff, mostly I learned how to work up my attitude. I know at the beginning I had a bad temper inside of me, but you guys helped me to always be happy.

I want to say thank you for giving me a tutor and a mentor to help me understand life and school work. Without them I wouldn’t know why I feel so different. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Aunjunae Moore


These are the kinds of letter that help us to know that what we're doing is having an impact on our students' lives.