Showing posts with label Detroit Schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Detroit Schools. Show all posts
Muslim and Jewish communities are defying stereotypes and coming together to do community service work across Michigan.
Volunteers from the Michigan Muslim Community Council, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Detroit and the Detroit community at-large joined forces in March to help beautify Nolan Elementary-Middle School, one of the many public schools that has been hit hard by the debt plaguing the Detroit school system.
“It’s two faiths coming together for one cause, which is helping our students who are going to be our future,” said Sumaiya Ahmed, the communications director for the Michigan Muslim Community Council.
While the Michigan senate recently approved $48.7 million in emergency funding for Detroit schools, keeping institutions like Nolan open through the year, the volunteers took matters into their own hands by organizing the library, fixing broken toilet seats in the bathrooms and painting murals along the school’s hallways.
Click HERE For The Full Article!
The Collab announces its Video ScholarshipCompetition for Detroit Public School (DPS) students. Four high school seniors will be selected to receive a scholarship worth $500 each. The scholarships are a result of proceeds raised from a February 13th, 2016 event called The Connection: A night of Art, Music, and Fellowship. The Collab is a conglomerate of four small businesses including Determination Media, DREAM Clothing, Bohemian Jones, and K. Welsh Designs that were started by four entrepreneurs from the city of Detroit.
Students are asked to creatively answer the question “How have you helped positively impact the city of Detroit and what are your plans to continue impacting the city?” in a 5 minutes or less video. Videos are to be submitted along with a completed scholarship packet by midnight April 17th, 2016. Official scholarship application can be downloaded at dreamclothing.biz and determinationmedia.com.
The Collab hosted a charity art showcase in February called The Connection: A night of Art, Music, and Fellowship to raise scholarship money for DPS students. “This year has been a challenging year for DPS students with all the negative attention the school system has received this academic year. We wanted to do something to reach back and help the students of today so that they can make a difference tomorrow.”
About The Collab
The "Collab" is a conglomerate of four small businesses including Determination Media, DREAM Clothing, Bohemian Jones, and K. Welsh Designs that were started by four entrepreneurs from the city of Detroit. It was created after these four businesses came together for the 2015 holiday season to host a fundraising event for Detroit based charities.
Determination Media is a digital marketing and branding company specializing in web design and social media management created by Denzell Turner. DREAM Clothing is a fashion and lifestyle brand created by Caleb Moss. Delonte"Bohemian Jones" Jones is a Detroit raised DJ and musician who is encouraging art through music and education in the Metro-Detroit area. Architect Kirk Welsh started K. Welsh Designs in 2014 designing for several organizations, businesses, and non-profits.
 |
| Photo: CBS Local |
I say this because it’s true and because I just read a column by Aaron Foley that offered a bleak – if sarcastic – warning to New Yorkers attracted by the Move to Detroit billboards. He cites shoddy schools, rising rents — as well as beer gardens without kids’ menus – as reasons why New York parents should ignore those catchy billboards and cross Detroit off their list. And he makes some valid points (though not his points about beer gardens because who needs a beer more than a parent?) But as a mom of two who quit her job in New York last year and moved to Detroit to be a part of its future, I’m here to tell Foley he’s wrong.
It’s true that there are no public playgrounds in my downtown Detroit neighborhood and that school options here are extremely limited. In Detroit, I don’t have the elaborate parent network I had in Brooklyn from which I could get advice or borrow baby gear. But I’m sending two kids to preschool for roughly half of what that cost in Brooklyn. We’re living in an apartment that’s significantly larger than the shoebox we shared in Brooklyn, for a much lower price, and I’m no longer commuting long distances and working the kind of marathon hours that were required for me to afford my life in New York. In Detroit, I spend much more time with my children than I ever did in family-friendly Brooklyn because here I’m not working all the time.
Click HERE For The Full Article!
Four DPS elementary schools and three middle schools were ranked on the list of Bridge Magazine’s Academic State Champs:
Elementary Schools
Thirkell Elementary-Middle School*
Chrylser Elementary School
Davison Elementary-Middle School*
Dixon Educational Learning Academy
*Ranked among the Top 10 Michigan Elementary Schools
Middle Schools
*Davison Elementary-Middle School
Burton International Academy
Clippert Academy
*Ranked among the Top 10 Michigan Middle Schools
Martin Luther King, Jr. Education Center, a DPS-authorized charter school, was also ranked as one of the Top Schools in Michigan by Bridge Magazine.
View the full list of Academic State Champs in Michigan
The choir at the Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences has a lot to be happy about.
Tuesday morning, the “Today” show called. Tuesday afternoon, the “Ellen” show called. Late Tuesday afternoon, a representative of “The Queen Latifah Show” called.
Representatives of all three shows want the 40-member school choir to perform their rendition of Pharrell’s “Happy” on air thanks to a video of them performing the catchy tune that went viral.
The two-minute video has been viewed more than 461,000 times on YouTube.
Click HERE for the full article!
Award-winning Arts Education Nonprofits Young Playwrights’ Theater and InsideOut Literary Arts Project to Bring High School Students from Two Cities Together through Poetry, Playwriting and 21st Century Technology
From October 14 to October 18, programming and leadership staff of DC-based Young Playwrights’ Theater (YPT) and Detroit-based InsideOut Literary Arts Project will meet in Detroit to create a brand new multidisciplinary art education curriculum that will be brought to classrooms in the two cities in the spring of 2014. My Art is So Loud: The 524 Project will allow high school students to rewrite the narrative about their cities and share their stories with students and adults around the country.
“Both Detroit and DC loom large in the national imagination,” says YPT Artistic Director Nicole Jost. “We hear stories about these two cities all the time. What we want to do is empower these young people—the city’s residents—to tell the stories of their own communities. Our hope is that they will challenge and inspire each other, as well as the rest of the country.”
The program curriculum will blend the strengths in both organizations’ curriculums to create a new, hybrid model that integrates poetry writing, playwriting and media arts. It will be implemented at Ballou Senior High School in DC and Western International High School in Detroit. These two classrooms will use iPad technology to teleconference and collaborate to create poetry, playwriting and visual art. This cross-disciplinary project will bridge the 524 miles between DC and Detroit, enabling students to begin a dialogue about how they relate to their hometowns and to create a new narrative of cities that are frequently represented to the world as centers of extreme poverty, high crime and violence. The project seeks to challenge perceptions and to build new understandings of Detroit and Washington, DC.
YPT will broadcast the plays, poetry, and video art created by the students to a national audience online via tumblr and through live performances in DC and Detroit, empowering youth to reclaim their city’s legacy and to spark conversations about each city’s past, present and future. Once the program begins, the tumblr will be updated in real time, featuring video footage from the students in the classroom, performances of student work, photo sharing and behind the scenes interviews with the teaching artists, giving audiences the opportunity to follow the story of this experimental program as it unfolds.
YPT was founded eighteen years ago, and has served over 11,000 students in the Greater Washington region in that time. This is the first time that the YPT model will be implemented outside of the DC area.
YPT is able to implement this project thanks to the MetLife/TCG A-ha! Program: Think It, Do It, which empowers Theatre Communications Group members to take groundbreaking approaches to artistic, managerial, production and/or technological challenges and opportunities. YPT was one of three theaters in the country to receive a $50,000 Do It grant this year.
“This is the kind of collaboration that could only happen in this time of new media and shrinking distances,” says Brigitte Moore, Executive Director of YPT. “Not only will the 524 Project empower young people to shape the national perception of their cities’ past, present and future, it will revolutionize possibilities for artistic collaboration using 21st century technology. We hope this project is only the first of its kind and are thrilled to have Detroit as our first national partner.”
This is the first investment in Detroit for CACSFF, an innovative real estate fund that provides much-needed capital to enable operators of best-in-class charter schools to secure permanent, high-quality school facilities. CACSFF has partnered with Lighthouse Academies once before to open North Point Lighthouse Charter School, a pre-K – 4th grade school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
“Successful charter schools have the potential to create better educational opportunities for children across the United States. We are committed to increasing the growth of proven academic performers by providing easier access to school facilities and bridging the gap to ownership,” said Bobby Turner, CACSFF Co-Managing Partner and Chairman and CEO of Canyon Capital Realty Advisors. “We are pleased to team up for a second time with Lighthouse Academies, which has an excellent track record of innovation and achievement. We are confident that Southwest Detroit Lighthouse Charter School will deliver terrific results for its new students.”
The only fund of its kind in the United States, CACSFF was created in 2011 as a joint venture between Canyon Capital Realty Advisors (CCRA) and Agassi Ventures (AV) to facilitate the development of school sites in urban communities across the United States. The partnership combines CCRA’s and AV’s substantial resources, development expertise and passion for educational excellence to assist the charter school community in securing academically friendly, environmentally sustainable school facilities for students and teachers. The number of charter schools across the country is continuing to grow year-over-year, and operators routinely cite securing suitable learning facilities as one of their greatest challenges.
“I believe that we must do everything we can to support strong schools in underserved communities. Our goal is to provide top-tier charter school operators with access to great facilities, and let them focus on what they do best: educating children,” said Andre Agassi, CACSFF Co-Managing Partner, CEO of Agassi Ventures and founder of the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy. “The Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund is enabling charter school operators like Lighthouse Academies to realize their full potential and expand their reach in communities where their expertise is so desperately needed.”
Founded in 2003, Lighthouse Academies is a growing network of charter schools that uses an arts-infused, K-12 college prep program to generate superior academic results. Its goal is to offer a replicable school model relying only on funding provided by law that closes the educational achievement gap and sends 100 percent of graduates on to college. The first Lighthouse Academies school opened in the Bronx, New York in 2004; with the addition of Southwest Detroit Lighthouse Charter Academy, the Lighthouse network includes 20 schools, serving more than 7,200 students in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.
“Lighthouse Academies is thrilled to partner with the Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund for a second time to expand our reach into a new community, Detroit,” said Michael Ronan, Founder and CEO of Lighthouse Academies. “CACSFF is a unique program, and one of the best structures I’ve come across in 15 years of working with charter schools. In this time of intense financial challenges, the support of entities like CACSFF is more important than ever to ensure Detroit's students have a pathway to college and rewarding careers.”
Over the next several years, CACSFF aims to facilitate the development of more than 75 urban school sites for best-in-class charter school operators, creating new seats for up to 50,000 students. The fund’s previous investments were KIPP Philadelphia Elementary Academy in Philadelphia, North Point Lighthouse Charter School in Milwaukee, and the EAGLE College Preparatory Schools’ Harmony Campus in Phoenix.
The fund has the backing of a world-class group of institutional investors who share CACSFF’s commitment to effecting positive societal change while pursuing positive financial returns.
In addition to providing high-performing charter school operators such as Lighthouse Academies with high-quality facilities at affordable lease rates, the fund provides charter school operators the opportunity to purchase their schools once they reach full occupancy. To this end, CACSFF will help operators obtain permanent financing to purchase their properties using New Market Tax Credits, tax-exempt bond offerings, or funding from the U.S. Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.
“The ability to secure adequate facilities is the greatest impediment to charter school growth, and CACSFF is uniquely positioned to provide long-term facilities to high-quality charter operators so they can provide the best education possible for their students,” said CACSFF CEO Glenn Pierce. “As we continue investing across the country, more charter operators are recognizing the value of this sustainable and market-driven fund, and are calling on CACSFF to help expand their reach. We look forward to opening many more schools in the near future.”
About Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund
The Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund is the nation’s first market-driven real estate fund designed to accelerate growth of high-performing charter schools and provide educational opportunities for 40,000-50,000 underserved students while simultaneously targeting market-rate financial returns for socially responsible investors. The Canyon-Agassi Charter School Facilities Fund is managed by Canyon-Agassi Realty Advisors, and is a partnership between an affiliate of Canyon Capital Realty Advisors LLC and Agassi Ventures, LLC. For more information, visit www.canyonagassi.com.
The Detroit Public Schools Foundation announces that 300 Detroit students will participate in the Future City Competition this school year because of a grant from ITC Holdings Corp. (ITC).
The $20,000 grant will cover the cost of the students to take part in the Competition, which is coordinated by the Engineering Society of Detroit.
The Future City Competition challenges students to design a city of the future - and have fun doing it. This program was designed to promote technological literacy and engineering to sixth, seventh and eighth grade students. The program fosters an interest in math, science and engineering through hands-on, real world applications and helps students better understand the practical applications of mathematical and scientific principles. The Future City Competition is a team-based program consisting of students, a teacher, and an engineer mentor.
“ITC is proud to support the Detroit Public Schools Foundation and its efforts to increase the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculum in its schools,” said Gregory Ioanidis, president, ITC Michigan. “The Future City Competition will help Detroit Public School students better understand the practical applications of math and science principles through hands-on, real world application of their studies.”
Through its Charitable Giving Program, ITC awards grants to qualified 501 (c) (3) organizations that deliver charitable services in the counties where ITC operates. Grants support programs and projects that reflect the values of ITC: education, environmental stewardship, social services and health and wellness.
“Thanks to ITC, hundreds of motivated Detroit students will get first-hand experience with science and math that will build on what they have learned in the classroom and, hopefully, propel them toward college and careers,” said Dr. Glenda Price, President of the Detroit Public Schools Foundation. “This is a shining example of the successful educational programs we are here to support.”
About ITC Holdings Corp.
ITC Holdings Corp. (NYSE: ITC) is the nation’s largest independent electric transmission company. Based in Novi, Michigan, ITC invests in the electric transmission grid to improve reliability, expand access to markets, lower the overall cost of delivered energy and allow new generating resources to interconnect to its transmission systems. ITC’s regulated operating subsidiaries include ITCTransmission, Michigan Electric Transmission Company, ITC Midwest and ITC Great Plains. Through these subsidiaries, ITC owns and operates high-voltage transmission facilities in Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma, serving a combined peak load exceeding 26,000 megawatts along 15,000 circuit miles of transmission line. Through ITC Grid Development and its subsidiaries, the company also focuses on expansion in areas where significant transmission system improvements are needed. For more information, please visit ITC’s website at www.itc-holdings.com. (itc-ITC).
About the Detroit Public Schools Foundation
The Detroit Public Schools Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to raising, managing and stewarding funds and other resources to support value-added programs and activities for the benefit of the Detroit Public Schools, DPS-authorized charter schools, DPS schools placed in the Education Achievement Authority, and their respective students. Detroit Public Schools Foundation operates independently of the Detroit Public Schools. For more information, visit detroitpsfoundation.org.
The Lions will officially kick off their new Living for the City initiatives this week with events at Eastern Market, Ford Field and Detroit Lions AcademyLUNCH WITH THE LIONS AT EASTERN MARKET AND FORD FIELD
The first Lunch with the Lions event will take place at Eastern Market and Ford Field on Tuesday (Sept. 25) featuring Lions’ offensive lineman Rob Sims, students from the William Beckham Academy in Detroit and select girls from the Detroit Lions Academy who will be hosted by the Detroit Lions Women’s Association.
Lunch with the Lions is a program that will provide vouchers for fresh foods from Eastern Market and cooking lessons at Ford Field to students at the Detroit Lions Academy and Detroit Public Schools. Lunch with the Lions will be held every Tuesday, September 25 through October 30.< Br />
Levy Restaurants Executive Chef Joe Nader, as part of the overall Detroit Lions/Eastern Market partnership, will teach participating DPS students how to make delicious meals from local ingredients purchased at Eastern Market.
“Giving back is the heart and soul of who we are. It is an honor to partner with the Lions and Living for the City to share our knowledge by teaching kitchen skills and helping kids learn about healthy eating,” said Nader.
The mission of the Detroit Lions’ partnership with Eastern Market is to improve food systems by engaging Lions fans, local leaders in communities and schools, parents and other stakeholders to deliver healthier foods to Detroit youth.
“BACK TO SCHOOL JAM” AT DETROIT LIONS ACADEMY
On Tuesday (Sept. 25) Lions’ defensive lineman Nick Fairley will help kick off the Living for the City initiative by hosting a “Back to School Jam” at Detroit Lions Academy.
During the event Fairley will provide students with backpacks and school supplies for the new school year as well as talk to them about the importance of education and staying in school. The event will also feature local artist “Brilliance,” who will perform a series of songs including hit singles “One Day” and “Where Did I Go.”
“I wanted to put together a local event for underserved youth during the back to school season,” said Fairley. “Deciding to do it with Detroit Lions Academy was a natural fit. Speaking to this group of students about the importance of school and staying on the right path will hopefully make an impact on the start of their school year.”
Detroit Lions Academy is a strategic partner of the Lions’ Living for the City initiative, and offers Detroit students an opportunity to learn and achieve in a structured, caring and safe learning environment that can address their individual learning needs. Through the Lions’ support, students receive additional social-emotional support due to severe challenges that have impeded their progress.
COMMUNITY GARDEN BUILD AT DETROIT LIONS ACADEMY
On Saturday (Sept. 29), The Lions along with Eastern Market Corporation, the Detroit Lions Women’s Association and Detroit Public Schools will team up to build a sustainable community garden at Detroit Lions Academy.
The goal of the garden is to expand teachers' access to real-life laboratories to teach students about healthy eating, nutrition, and concepts around growing food while increasing the schools' access to fresh fruits and vegetables. This ensures that Detroit Lions Academy students are able to learn in a real world context relating to agriculture. Exposing students to the science behind a productive garden, and encouraging science experiments in the garden also fosters student-interest in Science as a hobby or career.
Additionally, the program assures that more fresh food from farms and gardens will be used in the Detroit Lions Academy cafeteria. Through the gardens, students also will gain a greater understanding of the importance of fresh fruits and vegetables, become ambassadors of healthy foods and will be encouraged to share information with their families.
ABOUT LIVING FOR THE CITY
Living for the City is the philanthropic program of The Detroit Lions. Its goal is to support transformational efforts that improve the well-being of metro Detroit’s underserved communities. Living for the City focuses on sustainable health and wellness initiatives and community development. Living for the City supports organizations that pursue integrated approaches to physical fitness, healthy eating, housing, land use and environmental planning, public transportation, community infrastructure, and aligned workforce opportunities. For more information, please visit www.detroitlions.com/community.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)