Educate Arkansas: City Year Little Rock
Education in Arkansas is so important. Today on The Vine, we have City Year Little Rock, which helps students succeed by delivering evidence-based holistic support through one-on-one tutoring to social-emotional skill-building sessions. Jennifer Cobb, senior vice president and executive director, is here to tell us about these amazing opportunities.
Arkansas is 41st in the United States, so there's a lot of work we have to do. An optimist says this gives us the opportunity to grow.
That's right. I love your word optimist. At City Year, we also like the word idealist because that’s the work that we're doing. We work with grades three through nine, and we deploy young adults, ages 17 to 25, into classrooms to serve as student success coaches. They're not teaching, but I like to say they're serving as an extra set of hands and an extra heart for the teacher. You've heard, there’s a big learning gap due to COVID. It was big before COVID, but you can only imagine how behind these young students are now. So, we’re able to go in and serve in classrooms all day every day, and we also run after-school programs. We make sure that we do everything we can to lift the culture of the school, but to also close those learning gaps for literacy and math.
How can people utilize your services?
Right now, we are serving in four Little Rock schools - Mabelvale Elementary, Mabelvale Middle School, Cloverdale Middle School and JA Fair, kindergarten through eighth grade. We would love to serve more schools, but we need more Corps members. So, I would love for anyone who's listening, anyone who has a child - if you're a grandparent, aunt, uncle or friend. If you have someone in your life who is aged 17 to 24 who's ready to change their own life but also the life of students in the Little Rock School District, we are still accepting applications for this year's Corps members, and we would love to talk to them.
How can people find more information?
You can go to our website, cityyear.org.
I want to end our time together by quoting Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” We need to start that right here. Education in Arkansas is so important.
