We’ve all heard the phrase about opportunity knocking; however in some areas it doesn’t come to visit as often. For students living in disadvantaged areas getting access to quality programs outside of school can be difficult. To complicate matters, programs often neglect these areas and students. This is due to their inability to afford the cost of a high school summer program.
Working Together
Leadership Society of Arizona strives to educate students from all economic backgrounds. LSA also actively seeks opportunities to work with schools in disadvantaged areas. Our goal is to bring our leadership and stress reduction education to groups of students who need it the most. In order to achieve such goals, we will work extensively with the schools we are partnered with. Our efforts would be focused on raising the funds to bring a quality high school summer program to them.
High School Summer Program
There are various methods in which this may take shape. For the North High School summer program, the school was able to fund half of the cost of the program. So, LSA worked with its extensive network connections to get tax credit donations for the other half of the funds. As you can read about in more detail in our other articles, the North program was a huge success.
Another method to reach these students is to utilize some of the government funding available for these schools. Some schools and groups we are currently working with have been able to bring in LSA under federal funding. We describe both the Title I and Title VII programs in the section below. We encourage any institution wanting to bring our leadership high school summer program to their students to look into the grants and funding available to them through the Department of Education.
Department Funding
Title I provides “financial assistance to local educational agencies (LEAs) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families to help ensure that all children meet challenging state academic standards.”
Title VII supports “the efforts of local educational agencies, Indian tribes and organizations, postsecondary institutions, and other entities to meet the unique educational and culturally related academic needs of American Indian and Alaska Native students, so that such students can meet the same challenging State student academic achievement standards as all other students are expected to meet.”
Making a Difference
But merely hosting the high school summer program in these areas is not enough to really reach the students. Along with teaching the students that they control their lives and happiness, the LSA team structures the classes to give the students as much individualized attention as possible.
To do so, we bring in a team of teaching assistants along with the instructors to go around the class and get to know the students one-to-one and understand the struggles that those students are going through. Having the one to one attention in a Socratic learning environment structured around the student rather than the material allows the students to relax and engage with the information and its application to all aspects of their lives.
LSA will continue to support education across all socioeconomic and cultural boundaries by working with education and industry partners to provide the same high quality logic and leadership education to the future leaders of those communities.