Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance
Since its founding in 1992, Arts Education for Maryland Schools (AEMS) Alliance has worked to ensure that all of Maryland’s public schoolchildren have consistent and equitable access to high quality arts education. In Baltimore City, arts education is largely uncoordinated, with unevenly distributed resources and nonexistent or incomplete data. This grant will support a three-county pilot of the Artlook Data Map, a searchable database that provides information about arts courses at each school, the percentage of students enrolled, and the community arts partners who work there. Ultimately, Artlook will increase accountability and promote equitable opportunities for arts education in Maryland public schools.
The Urban Alliance Foundation, Inc.
Urban Alliance (UA), founded in 1996 in Washington, DC, is a national youth development non-profit that provides economically-disadvantaged young people with the exposure, opportunity, support and training needed to prepare them for lifelong economic self-sufficiency. Its core program matches high school seniors with paid, professional internships, jobs skills training, one-on-one mentoring, and ongoing post-program support. With previous Abell funding, Urban Alliance is now also placing career bound CTE 12th graders in internships and employment. This Abell grant will support strategic and implementation planning to expand Urban Alliance’s youth employment model into a systemic career readiness provider and workforce intermediary among Baltimore City Public Schools, the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development and employers.
Springboard Collaborative
Springboard Collaborative, initiated in Philadelphia in 2011, is designed to close the literacy gap by closing the gap between home and school. Now operating in 10 cities, Springboard offers summer, afterschool, and in-school programs that combine targeted reading instruction for PreK-3rd graders; weekly workshops training parents to teach reading at home; a rigorous coaching cycle for teachers; and an incentive structure that awards learning tools to families—from books to tablets—in proportion to their kids’ reading progress. Springboard’s Summer pilot in Baltimore increased reading levels for 330 students by 4.3 months in 6 weeks, and engaged 73% of parents in school and home literacy learning. This grant from Abell and funding from Baltimore City Schools will enable Springboard to launch its Afterschool Program in Spring 2019 for 900 low-performing K-3rd grade readers.
MERIT Health Leadership Academy
MERIT, founded in 2011 by a TFA City teacher, is now a comprehensive academic and career mentorship program supporting Baltimore City public school students who aspire to careers in medicine. MERIT scholars take advanced academic classes on Saturdays, work in hospitals and lab during paid summer internships, and receive long-term college and career mentorship. Serving over 300 talented students as early as 8th grade, MERIT can boast that 96% of its participants enroll in 4-year colleges with an aim of 90% college completion. The current Abell award will specifically support the college-prep and pre-med curriculum development for Baltimore’s aspiring health professionals in MERIT’s 8th grade through College program.
The Literacy Lab
As the first national replication partner of the successful Minnesota Reading Corps,The Literacy Lab’s core capability is delivering research and evidence-based literacy interventions to students in high poverty schools who are at risk for reading failure by the end of third grade. Partnering with Baltimore City Schools since 2016, Literacy Lab uses two models: in the Pre-K model, tutors are placed in a single classroom where they are trained to provide individual and small group literacy interventions. In kindergarten through third grade settings, the tutors provide pullout one-on-one reading interventions for 20 minutes daily, five days per week, to a rotating caseload of 16 to18 students. This Abell grant will support the expansion of Literacy Lab to 15 Baltimore City elementary schools and will serve close to 900 PreK-3rd grade struggling readers; 70% of participants will show significant growth.