New Leaders – Baltimore
With the help of Abell Foundation start-up funding in 2005, the New Leaders Program has trained 375 leaders and developed 126 new principals making them the leading provider of training for principals and school leaders in City Schools. The New Leaders program seeks to train high quality principal candidates to lead schools, support teacher retention, and build teams. There are currently 112 New Leaders alumni actively working in education in Baltimore City, including 46 principals representing 29% of all principals in the district.
Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools
The Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools (MAPCS) is a non-partisan group that serves as a voice for charter school communities. MAPCS helps to advocate for equitable and transparent conditions for public charter schools, offers support to new and existing public charter schools, and drives the discussion around innovative educational practices that lead to positive outcomes for students. In Baltimore City, thirty charter schools serve 20% of the public school students or around 13,000 students annually.
Baltimore’s Promise, Fiscally Sponsored by Fund for Educational Excellence
The Summer Funding Collaborative (SFC) is an aligned fund that directs resources to high-quality summer programs for low-income children in Baltimore City. In 2021, the SFC included 13 public and private funders that, collectively, distributed $3.46 million to 87 programs, funding a projected 9,500 seats. This grant includes funding for between 5-10 non-profit organizations providing summer experiences that will be determined in late winter 2022 alongside funding for high dosage tutoring programs to provide layered support to funded summer providers.
Baltimore Kids Chess League, Inc.
Sponsored by the Abell Foundation and Baltimore City Public Schools since 2004, the Baltimore Kids Chess League (BKCL) offers an academic extracurricular program that serves more than 750 children from kindergarten to 12th grade in thirty schools. Teams practice weekly under the auspices of trained chess coaches and compete in novice, local, state, and national chess tournaments sponsored by the United States Chess Federation.
Attendance Works, Fiscally Sponsored by Community Initiatives
Attendance Works will partner with the Success For All Foundation (SFA) in Baltimore City to provide an integrated attendance mentoring strategy, paired with intensive tutoring to negate learning loss and narrow equity gaps. Training for at least 22 tutors on how to effectively respond to absences and promote attendance is modeled after the Success Mentors initiative in New York that successfully yielded reduced absenteeism of nearly two weeks (nine days of school) for around 60,000 students between the years of 2010 and 2013.