Education Champions!

Again I’m in Memphis on the 27th of the month. Today I had the opportunity to meet with several groups of people from varying backgrounds. I’d like to share with you two of those individuals and how they are thinking about education for Memphis.

This morning I attended a kickoff event for a city-wide initiative called Education Champions, and I met Rick Ferguson, headmaster at St. George’s Independent School. SGIS has a three campus model which is noteworthy for its attempt to build relationships among different socioeconomic and racial groups: the Germantown (suburb) and Memphis lower schools merge into a fully integrated campus middle/upper school. Typically low-income kids leave great private high schools they’ve worked hard to get into within their first year because they are not used to the elite private school environment. What SGIS is doing seems to be a hopeful approach to ensuring better success for our kids from the city.

I also met this morning with mothers to help them understand their choices for their children’s education. (Read & view videos from those meetings here.) After the meeting, I spoke with Carole, a retired teacher who has volunteered in Binghampton for almost ten years and is passionate about helping these women set a positive vision for their future. For Carole, a takeaway from today’s brief meeting was that she can help the mothers learn how to get involved with their children’s education and help empower the mothers to take action.

I am so thankful for all the “education champions” in Memphis who know education is a key to making this city a better place!