Teach For America-Baltimore
Teach For America’s organizational mission is to find, develop, and support equity-oriented leaders, to transform education and expand opportunity for children, starting in the classroom. Teach For America Baltimore utilizes a strategy of recruiting a diverse group of leaders from across the nation to commit at least two years of teaching to high needs classrooms. For the 2020-2021 school year, Teach For America seeks to strategically recruit and place 83-92 diverse corps members in difficult to staff teaching positions in low-income schools, alongside providing ongoing support to nearly 1300 alumni leaders working in various roles including principals, non-profit leaders, or other positions with the capacity to impact education throughout the city.
Baltimore Kids Chess League, Inc.
Sponsored by the Abell Foundation and Baltimore City Public Schools since 2004, Baltimore Kids Chess League (BKCL) offers an academic extracurricular program that serves more than 150 children from kindergarten to 12th grade in 21 schools. Due to Covid, BKCL has migrated to a new virtual format, using the innovative “Think Like A King” chess software to move students through chess strategy sessions, assigning a chess rating based on each student’s level of play, and effectively matching opponents with an equivalent level of chess skill. 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.
Safe Alternative Foundation for Education, Inc.
The SAFE Center youth facility opened in 2015 in order to provide West Baltimore middle school students with 1,250 hours of supervised, afterschool, weekend, and summer programming annually. Focusing on learning opportunities in the areas of literacy, STEAM, and health and fitness, the SAFE Center works primarily with students from Franklin Square Elementary/Middle School. The current Abell Foundation grant is designed to address the challenges with remote learning by establishing an in-person learning pod for 22 middle school students. This learning pod provides students with access to the resources they need to attend school on-line as well as receive assistance from SAFE staff who can provide classwork assistance, monitor work completion, and provide a structured learning environment for the students.
STEM Champions of Baltimore Inc.
Over the past seven years, STEM Champions of Maryland has developed as a staging ground to prepare 375 students in 32 middle and high schools throughout the city for competition in numerous STEM based events as a part of the National Science Olympiad competition, the largest broad-based STEM competition in Baltimore. STEM Champions of Maryland trains teacher coaches to provide robust curricula and materials for each of the 18 Science Olympiad activities. STEM Champions also brings over 200 STEM professionals and volunteers together to work with teachers in afterschool practices and to facilitate the annual Citywide Science Olympiad competition.
The Literacy Lab
The Literacy Lab employs a professionalized tutoring workforce that provides one-on-one, small group, and whole group literacy interventions to 690 students annually. A replication of the acclaimed Minnesota Reading Corps, Literacy Lab embeds rigorously trained reading tutors in PreK classrooms and provides 1:1 tutoring in schools to children in Kindergarten through third grade. Literacy Lab tutoring participants are between 1.5 to 5 times as likely to be on grade level than students who started at the same grade level and received no tutoring. Approximately 20% of participating students will achieve literacy benchmarks and end the school year on grade level.