Brainstorming Change

The Queen works for a school in a low income area of town. Many of the parents of students are involved in gangs. Many parents are not home very much, so the kids are on their own a lot of the time. There is a church that is located in a an upper middle class area of town that supports the school with whatever they need. They have one person who is there every week.

This church inspires me. They really support the kids and families of this school in everything they do. If they kids need something, all the school needs to do is ask and the church does there best to get those items for the kids. For example, every year the church supplies many, if not all, of the students with back packs and school supplies. When one of the teachers started a Saturday academy for the kids, he asked the church for shirts and they provided them.

Last year The Queen had this girl in her fourth grade class who was behind in every subject. She could not read or write, but she tried really hard and wanted to learn. Everyone thought she might have some learning disabilities, so they tested her. It turned out that she did not have any disabilities, but was affected because her family moved a lot when she was younger. She was just always behind so she never learned the things she was supposed to. I really wanted to help her and mentioned it to The Queen a few times, but I never acted on it.

Last night we were sitting in one of our favorite Mexican food restaurants and I told her that the book "Linchpin" was really motivating me to do something. I told her that I would like to volunteer in an after school program at her school. We were talking about it for a while and she told me that she thought something involving computers would be good. I said that was fine, but I would like to make it very unstructured so that the kids could choose what we did.

I mentioned that it would be great if we could get a company like Apple to donate some laptops and maybe a company like Canon could donate some cameras. We could then have weekly assignments for the kids to look for. They could find their own solutions to problems like intersecting lines. I think it would teach them to look at their world in a different way. It would show them that beauty can even be found in their own neighborhood. I got really excited about this idea. Now all I have to do is find some way to get some laptops and cameras so I can move forward with this idea. I think this is too much to ask of the church.

I also mentioned to T-Bird that we can't rely on teachers alone to run after school activities for the kids. We need to get the community involved. We need to get local graphic artists to come in and teach the kids about art. We need to get local business people to come in and talk to them about entrepreneurship. We need to get the local college to come in and talk to them about opportunities for education. We need to try to open their eyes to the possibilities that are available to them.

Now comes the hard part.