In response to recent school closures, CSCA staff are implementing virtual ways to maintain strong relationships with their students as regularly scheduled apprenticeships are now postponed until further notice. As school closures are extended, our staff are preparing to work even more closely with school leaders and teachers to directly support the potential academic slide. We are preparing to return to school ready to support wherever we are needed the most.
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This Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday inspired Citizen Schools California campuses to engage in projects that benefited the community. All seven of our campuses participated: West Lake Middle School, Greenleaf Elementary School, McKinley Institute of Technology, Joseph George Middle School, William Sheppard Middle School, Renaissance Academy at Fischer, and Renaissance Academy at Mathson.
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Students embark on intersession activities every semester before apprenticeships begin, where they are given the opportunity to explore new passions or hone important skill sets with their classmates. This consists of activities ranging from developing ideas for a new phone application to playing math games and mastering proficiency levels in different subjects.
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Citizen Schools California ended a successful Fall semester with WOW! events, a culmination of the 10-week-long apprenticeship program. In apprenticeships, volunteers across different industries teach their passion to students once a week for 1.5 hour sessions. Students spend the semester learning a particular skill set or subject matter, all while working towards developing a final project.
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Bin Wu is a 10-time Citizen Teacher for Citizen Schools California, participating in Tech Challenge and several other Apprenticeships over the last five years. Though her background of growing up in China is quite different from the students she serves or the campuses she’s on, she believes deeply in exposing people to something different.
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This month, Citizen Schools students at Joseph George Middle School in San Jose, California created a drug awareness campaign on campus. Staff and students worked with the Leadership Academy, a group of 30 seventh and eighth grade Citizen Schools students responsible for promoting school spirit and bringing attention to school-wide issues.
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Each semester, Citizen Schools California hosts apprenticeships, 10-week long hands-on projects led by passionate volunteers who teach students topics ranging from cooking to coding. This semester, we are excited to offer Qigong and Taiji as an apprenticeship at Renaissance Academy at Mathson, taught by Citizen Teacher Jerriline Martinez from Cisco, with support from Teaching Fellow Renee Lemieux. Read what Jerriline had to say about her experience as a Citizen Teacher:
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On November 5th, community members from across the Bay Area came together to watch our apprenticeships in action at the McKinley Institute of Technology (MIT) site visit in Redwood City, CA. Attendees had the opportunity to meet with the Citizen Schools leadership team and hear from a panel of school partners and volunteer Citizen Teachers. They took a tour of the Tuesday after-school program and sat in on featured apprenticeships such as Fit Kids, Career Horizons, Making Beats, and Lego Robotics.
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This past summer, Citizen Schools California kicked off the year with Summer Institute, where rising and returning campus staff came together to prepare for the school year ahead of them. New Teaching Fellows came from all over the country, eager to tackle the opportunity gap that our students face. They learned skills such as lesson planning, classroom management and culturally responsive teaching.
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On June 30, a group of new players took to the field at Oracle Park before the San Francisco Giants game against the Arizona Diamondbacks! Thanks to Bank of America’s support, 9 middle school students from Citizen Schools were able to run onto the field and take positions for the Kids Take the Field presentation. Students were even able to meet the players while out on the field, an experience the students said that they would never forget!
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Over 30 students from Renaissance Academy participated in the Wells Fargo Change the Future hackathon on Friday May 31st at PwC offices in San Jose, the culminating event of Citizen Schools’ semester-long Change the Future coding clubs. Teaching Fellows at both Renaissance campuses implemented rigorous weekly sessions where student groups designed application prototypes to solve an issue in their community. In preparation for the hackathon, students spent hours researching, designing, and creating business plans for their apps
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This year, benefitEd was disguised as a mini mock trial. It was the Opportunity Gap vs. Citizen Schools. We honored the commitment of our long-time law partners, McDermott Will & Emery, Ropes & Gray, and Wilmer Hale. From start to finish, with close to 250 people in the room, once again, our students not only ran the show but stole it as well.
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In the Citizen Schools apprenticeship, Carbon Footprint, students learn to research and analyze the carbon footprint of their school over the course of a 10-week period. Students develop skills around how to collect data, communicate with teammates, and eventually create an action plan for their school based on their findings.
This Spring is the second semester this class is offered at McKinley Institute of Technology (MIT) in Redwood City. Lead by a Citizen Teacher in her third semester, the current apprenticeship is taking experiential learning one step further, by engaging students in a process-oriented approach to increase effective recycling on campus.
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During winter intersession, the six weeks between the fall and spring semester, approximately 350 students in the Citizen Schools’ California region completed an academically rigorous STEM curriculum challenge. The curriculum created and licensed by Tata Consultancy Services, allows students to design paper and electronic prototypes of an app that will help solve a community problem. During their challenge, they get the chance to practice their design thinking skills through a lens of empathy while learning about different STEM careers.
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Erica Yoon, joined Citizen Schools after graduating from UC Berkeley with a Bachelors majoring in Cognitive Science Education minor. Serving as a AmeriCorps Teaching Fellow at Greenleaf K-8 Elementary School family in Oakland, California, she says “I love this job! It is definitely a position that comes with various challenges, but the relationships I make and the improvements I see on a daily basis keep me going.” Outside of work, she enjoys going for swims, playing Monopoly Deal, and singing karaoke.
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An avid soccer player, Santy explained that the only reason he even heard about Menlo School, a private school in Atherton, was because of an after-school program, Citizen Schools, where he would wait out the gap of time between the end of school and the start of soccer practice and took an extracurricular course about local private school opportunities.
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A team of five intrepid students from Fischer Renaissance participated in a FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Qualifier tournament at Santa Clara High School November 11, 2018 as part of a Citizen School Apprenticeship. Lead by by a team of mentors, and Americorps members James Wesselman (myself) and Jamila Mentuhotep (Citizen Schools Teaching Fellows), the team finished the fun filled day ranking 6th in the robot game outperforming experienced better funded teams.
Read MoreJacky Bailey is a volunteer Citizen Teacher who joined Citizen Schools, after moving to the Bay Area from Australia, because she missed working with students and wanted to get to know her new community. When Bailey decided to teach an apprenticeship with Citizen Schools for the second time, she wanted to ensure her students could enact and advocate for change in the real world - and not just theoretically in the classroom.
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Fresh from a visit to the greenhouse and a bit of weeding in a row of radishes and pumpkins, 18 youngsters gathered to show what they’d soaked up during their field trip to the Veggielution organic farm in San Jose.
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