In his day job, Adam Marcus directs a research laboratory focused on cancer biology at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute. But at least twice a month, Marcus packs up his microscope and takes it to rural and urban schools across Georgia. He says he wants to show kids that science is more than textbook illustrations and eccentric movie characters. He’s opened the eyes of more than 3,000 students in 200 classrooms so far.
Georgia is now one of ten states identified by the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth for having a higher-education network to combat collegiate homelessness. Every university in the state assigns a “single point of contact” for homeless students and those in foster care, and Kennesaw State University’s Campus Awareness, Resource & Empowerment Center has been a model for other universities: It provides homeless, hungry, and at-risk students with assistance; collects and distributes donations at Owl’s Closet; and collaborates with the Homeless Awareness Week program at the university to involve and educate the entire campus.
An undercurrent of distrust has long pervaded DeKalb County schools. Thanks to perceptions that the “other part” of the county was getting more resources, parents in north and south DeKalb were deeply suspicious of each other. It took a crisis to bring them together. In 2013, as DeKalb was threatened with the loss of accreditation, Parent Councils United formed. Today parents continue to work together as the system stays on track to regain full accreditation. They sponsored a town hall meeting and forums for school board elections, and they’re gearing up to provide input in the superintendent search. “We’re working on getting beyond biases of the way things have always been done,” says Allyson Gevertz, a north DeKalb parent who cochairs the group with Donna Priest-Brown, her south DeKalb counterpart.
Instead of dance or music, Science of Fun offers STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) afternoon programs and summer camps to kids as young as five. The goal is to make children comfortable with concepts like inertia, force, and circuits, says founder Kris Webb. The programs typically enroll an equal number of girls and boys; most are nearby Decatur students, but some come from as far away as Johns Creek and Stone Mountain.
There are many ways to quantify the difference between students from low-income homes and those raised in more financially stable settings. Here’s one: 30 million words.
Between birth and the day she starts pre-K, a poor child will take part in fewer conversations, hear fewer bedtime stories, and be spoken to far less by adults than a child in a wealthy or working-class family. All those missed opportunities contribute to a staggering disparity: According to research presented in a 2003 American Educator article, the average child raised by professional parents hears 215,000 words a week, compared with 125,000 for one in a working-class household and only 62,000 for one raised in a low-income home. This creates a ripple effect; children who hear fewer words in their earliest years have smaller vocabularies and a harder time learning to read and write. There’s also a more subtle gap. Kids in wealthier families aren’t only exposed to more language overall, but the words they hear are also more encouraging (“great job”) than discouraging (“stop that”), which makes them more confident when they reach school age.
To help lower-income children overcome this conversation and confidence deficit, the Atlanta Speech School’s Rollins Center for Language and Literacy has created a teacher-training program that emphasizes conversation, story reading, and encouragement. A pilot program started in 2007, training sixty teachers at the Charles R. Drew Charter School in East Lake, who in turn reached 720 students. The data was impressive. For instance, at the beginning of the school year, only 6 percent of pre-K children with below average vocabulary were deemed “reading ready”; by the end of the school year, the number increased more than tenfold. Philanthropies like the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation and the Zeist Foundation jumped on board, and the center was able to grow.
Throughout the years, the program has expanded to eighty-seven schools and preschools throughout metro Atlanta—and as far away as Crisp County. The Rollins Center provides teachers with workshops, in-class mentoring, co-teaching, and free online instruction.
The program allows the Atlanta Speech School to share its expertise, which has been honed over six decades and includes programs for children with a range of language-related learning differences, such as hearing problems and dyslexia. Founded in 1938, the school’s campus now encompasses four schools and five clinics and enrolls about 400 children. By contrast, during the 2013–2014 school year, the Rollins Center trained 980 teachers in 457 classrooms, reaching 7,600 students.
The center’s ultimate goal: To ensure that by 2020 all Georgia kids entering kindergarten are on path to read on grade level by third grade. “We want to empower teachers to empower children,” says Rollins director of academic development Kim Day. “We want children walking through that kindergarten door ready to learn to read.”
Kids from lower-income families face a host of struggles at school. Not having supplies to complete assignments is one of the most basic challenges. The Atlanta Community Food Bank, best known for supplying food to nonprofits throughout North Georgia, created Kids in Need to furnish teachers with supplies to distribute to students. Operating year-round from a cheerily decorated warehouse on the Westside, Kids in Need distributes hundreds of thousands of pounds of pencils, paper, binders, and other essentials to teachers in seventeen systems, including Clayton, Cobb, Fulton, and Hall counties. To qualify, teachers must work at schools where at least 80 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Believing that kids learn best when they’re not stuck behind desks in boring classrooms, Mount Vernon Presbyterian School created $500,000 open-concept flex spaces in the lower school. The spaces include common areas, barn doors instead of walls, and “wiggle chairs” that move along with antsy children. Educators from dozens of schools around the country—and three continents—have come to see how this visionary setup works.
