Five years ago, fresh out of college, I taught my first creative writing workshop in a Baltimore school. That very first day—nervous, young, worried that the kids would see through my lack of expertise—I met a child who lived to write.
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B-more moves towards empathy
Thursday, September 12, 2013We give young people the tools to express emotions that cannot be put into words. We help them understand empathy, and what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes.
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Baltimore kids are solving a national problem
Tuesday, July 30, 2013There are more than 600 kids in Baltimore this summer who are proving there’s a sustainable way to solve a national problem—reducing the educational disparities between rich and poor children.
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Showing up is half the battle!
Monday, July 22, 2013My embracing of the notion that showing up is half the battle results from my own childhood battles with absenteeism. Like many Baltimore students, school attendance was a challenge for me; I became a habitual truant and dropped out. After a year out of school, a series of personal struggles helped me realize that a better life was only possible through education.
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Heman Rai, Soccer Without Borders
Monday, May 13, 2013I was born in a refugee camp in Nepal. I never imagined I would go to college because the camp only offered 1st to 10th grade.
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Succeeding in Baltimore for fifteen years
Monday, April 29, 2013For the last fifteen years we’ve helped launch programs, some that have floundered and many that have flourished. Given the urgency of the issues we address, we’re very willing to take on risk and, with our partners, try new approaches. We’re here to test what’s possible and create new pathways to opportunity and justice. Fifteen years is a blip in time for our undertaking. We’re in it for the long haul—because, sometimes, it’s not until years later that the change for which we advocate is proven as the right road taken.
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Want better student attendance? Head Start may be part of the solution.
Monday, April 22, 2013Our study of attendance in City Schools’ early grades resulted in a surprising discovery. Head Start students began kindergarten with better attendance than peers from City Schools pre-kindergarten. Not only that, they maintained a higher level of attendance through the end of third grade! That’s four years after leaving the program.
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It’s time to redesign high school
Monday, April 15, 2013Expanding learning time and opportunities for students is not about adding something extra to the school day. It’s not about creating a program or one more initiative for a principal to manage. It’s about helping schools develop new ways of doing business by working in partnership with communities to make the most of all the great assets we’ve built up…
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How to be gritty: what children don’t know can hurt them
Monday, February 11, 2013If you’ve heard more in the past year than ever before about the role that grit and resiliency play in student achievement, that might be “a response to No Child Left Behind and this narrow focus on standardized testing,” Angela Duckworth suggests.
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No new youth jail for Baltimore but we must end the practice of charging youth as adults
Friday, January 18, 2013This week, Governor O’Malley’s administration announced that it will not build a $70 million 120-bed jail for youth who are charged as adults. Instead, it proposes spending $30 million to renovate an existing adult correctional facility that will be downsized to house up to 60 youth while they await their trials. Taking advantage of these savings, the administration also plans to build a treatment center for young people who are committed to the juvenile justice system and in need of residential treatment services. The total cost of these two ventures is estimated to be $73 million.
