Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University has presented Alden Andre with its Franciscan Impact Award and named Sandra Launey as Distinguished Alumni, John Vincent as Shining Star Alumni and Dr. Lisa McDivitt as Rising Star Alumni.
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Teacher turnover has an impact on all stakeholders in the school environment, and research shows that students struggle to perform well in schools with turnover year after year. Retaining effective staff can be a big challenge for schools and districts, as can figuring out how to solve the issues around this problem.
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Mariana is currently fifteen years old. As many other students around her age, she enjoys playing with her little sister and learning new subjects. Mariana’s family moved to the United States from El Salvador in 2016 on a quest for enhanced opportunities. “We left so I could have additional chances to work and study,” she says. It has been arduous to move here because I miss my aunts who are still in El Salvador”.
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This summer, Citizen Schools began a 2-year pilot, with teacher design partners, to develop and test a new approach to classroom instruction - one that pairs teachers with community experts to deliver engaging, real-world projects in middle school classrooms.
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In the quest for college and career readiness, policymakers are slowly but surely coming around to the importance of career readiness. Though much of this nascent effort is focused on career readiness for high schoolers, middle school is beginning to enter the discussion, too. The middle grades are a crucial time to engage, or reengage, students and put them on a path to college and career success. Research has demonstrated that grades, attendance, and engagement in middle school are strong predictors of high school graduation and postsecondary success. The Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University found that “sixth graders who failed math or English/reading, or attended school less than 80% of the time, or received an unsatisfactory behavior grade in a core course had only a 10% to 20% chance of graduating [high school] on time.”
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As summer’s blaze softens into autumn hues, our city’s children are back in the schoolhouse. For many students in the Boston Public Schools, summer was more productive, inspirational and fun than they expected. This is thanks to citywide work to replace traditional summer school with creative and research-based summer learning, as well as a growing commitment in Boston to ensure all students, regardless of family income, access a wide range of summer activities.
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Students across Somerville are settling into a new school year. Just a few weeks ago they (nervously, excitedly, or even begrudgingly, I’m sure) returned to the classroom. They may or may not know they returned to a district that has been steadily racking up achievements and accolades in recent years. To name a few, on the 2016 MCAS, Somerville was the state-leading urban district for growth, the Brown School earned the prestigious Commendation School Award for outstanding growth, and Somerville High School remained the only Level 1 urban high school, a distinction they’ve held for the past four years. We should all be proud that our schools are on an upward trend. But we shouldn’t be complacent. These successes didn’t happen overnight.
Read MoreWhen I first came to the school and found out that I had to stay in school till 4:45 I didn’t want to, and this was a mandatory thing for all grades that had Citizen Schools. I felt like this was just a waste of my time, but just two weeks in I loved staying after school because we learned a lot about people and their jobs and I learned about the kids in my class. They were all strange unfamiliar faces when I came but during Citizen Schools they became my friends.
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Have you heard anything about DACA and/or DAPA? DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, DACA is an American immigration policy founded by the Obama administration in June 2012. Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents sometimes called Deferred Action for Parental Accountability, is a planned American immigration policy to grant deferred action status to certain undocumented immigrants. DAPA and DACA give immigrants opportunities such as employment, but there are some downsides to DACA and DAPA that affect many immigrants. DACA and DAPA programs do too little to protect undocumented immigrants while allowing them to legally stay in the US because their rights can be easily taken away and they don’t know if they can get citizenship. But others, like Republicans think that immigrants get too much support because there is too much spent on the immigrants.
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People know me as the shy girl, the mute. But I want others to know that I am more than just shy. This is not who I really am, and Citizen Schools knows it’s not who I am. I have always had a fear of public speaking, and my mom always told me that it was just a phase. She, too, was shy and reclusive, but now she's a social butterfly. I hope to become more social like her to some extent. I just don't know where to start. My Citizen Schools writing coach told me that being scared to talk in public is all in my head and it's nothing to be afraid of. I use that advice everyday to help me in speak up in groups.
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In the spring of 2011, Jose Melo, a fifth grader at the Dever McCormack School in Dorchester, MA, took his first apprenticeships with Citizen Schools: It’s All About Gummy Bears and Bootstrap. In the midst of learning the science behind what makes gummy bears gummy and what it takes to program a video game, he discovered an appetite for science and math. By the time he graduated from eighth grade three years later, Jose had completed a total of twelve apprenticeships through Citizen Schools - all of which had a focus on STEM.
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This past week, I had the opportunity to sit with a group of rising Boston 9th grader girls, who were both graduates of our 8th Grade Academy program and summer interns at Citizen Schools. We gathered to talk about their experience with us and the ways in which Citizen Schools is – and isn’t yet – fulfilling its promise to help middle school students launch confidently into their high school years.
Read MoreThe STEM Mentoring Awards and Symposium are a platform to celebrate and encourage exceptional work taking place across the country. By bringing together a national community of policy makers, school leaders, industry partners, and philanthropists, we will share promising practices and raise awareness for cross-sector collaboration as an essential approach to meaningful education reform.
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For the past 10 weeks, I have been inspired by the future engineers, doctors, veterinarians and artists of the Bay Area. At week one they may have seemed like your average middle schooler, but by week 10, it was made clear – they are the remarkable Girls for a Change (GFAC).
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Citizen Schools Massachusetts Teaching Fellows, staff, friends and family gathered at Citizen Schools Headquarters in Boston to congratulate TF2s as they finished their two years of service. Campus directors supervisors were on hand to personally congratulate each TF and share moments from their time at schools around Boston and Chelsea.
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There are a number of institutions across the US that recognize the hard work, dedication and drive of AmeriCorps members. They offer a variety of inscentives like matching tution funding to the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award. See a list of participating universities in the Citizen Schools footprint below, or browse the full list here.
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ExpandED Schools recently hosted its final intervisitation of the school year at Renaissance School of the Arts (RSA) located in East Harlem.
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Sydney Chaffee came to Citizen Schools as an AmeriCorps Teaching Fellow, looking for a way to start her teaching career. She spent two years teaching at schools in Boston with citizen Schools before working at Codman Academy in Dorchester. Sydney was recently awarded the National Teacher of the Year award for her work at Codman Academy. We asked Sydney how her time at Citizen Schools has influenced her work as a teacher.
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