Trendsetting Charter Schools by Schmitt Gary J.;Miller Cheryl; & Cheryl Miller

Author:Schmitt, Gary J.;Miller, Cheryl; & Cheryl Miller [Schmitt, Gary J. & Miller, Cheryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-02-26T19:29:15+00:00

Civic Education at YES Prep

While both KIPP and YES Prep emphasize character education, YES Prep has a stronger focus on community service and citizenship. Originally, YES Prep required community service every Saturday, but over time this practice faded. Few organizations knew just what to do with dozens or even hundreds of students descending on a site at one time. As one teacher recalls, “What we discovered was that not many people want eleven-year-olds to do service, so it was really challenging to find meaningful opportunities.” A longtime administrator details some of the practical challenges to doing service on a weekly basis:

When you work with nonprofits, a lot of times things fall flat. They say they have all this work and then you show up with twenty-five kids and it is, like, twenty minutes of work. Food banks are great because they’ll take four hundred of us, but it’s not like there’s a big takeaway, just that people need food. . . . People don’t want middle school students, even though our middle school students are really well behaved, and once we get our foot in the door, we get great responses, but unfortunately when they hear about middle schools they say, “We’ll pass; give us kids who are fifteen or older.”

YES Prep then experimented with doing eight service days a year, although renting buses alone cost $10,000 each Saturday, and planning and implementing service projects taxed the resources of already hardworking teachers.12 Academics also consumed teacher and student attention—to the dismay of some YES Prep veterans.

One administrator laments, “I don’t think we are doing as much [service] as we used to. A lot of that is about having to raise the bar academically.” Another agrees that “with all the [academic] pressure, teachers do not want to give up much instructional time. . . . A lot of things were stripped away, such as service and after-school clubs. Now we are at the point where we can add back things that are important, such as service.”

Practical considerations led YES Prep to rethink its approach to service. As one longtime YES Prep leader puts it, the best way to develop adults engaged in their communities is to teach young people the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to attend and succeed at top-tier colleges and universities. Given that roughly 90 percent of YES Prep students will be first-generation college students and almost a third of seniors are working to help their families or to save for college, it is difficult to both prepare students for college and push them to consider top-tier schools far from Houston. Yet YES Prep does this, with considerable success.

For many YES Prep teachers and administrators, one of the primary benefits of service is getting students to look beyond Houston and broaden their horizons. One teacher observes, “Kids . . . have a tendency to not see anything outside their own school or their own little neighborhood, so a lot of the value of service was getting them outside that narrow world to the broader world.

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