As a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy of service, City Year considers Martin Luther King Day as a day ‘on’ not ‘off’. Every year on MLK Day, City Year mobilizes its 2,800 AmeriCorps members and thousands of volunteers for a day of service in communities across the country. In coordination with Microsoft, City Year AmeriCorps members and volunteers will engage in service projects at Meyer Elementary School in San Jose, including mural-painting, gardening, and light construction. Sign up here to join us.
Every day City Year AmeriCorps members are changing the DNA of the schools that need it most. To put a finer point on it, earlier this year America got some good news and California got a wakeup call. The good news – the U.S. high school graduation rate improved from 72 percent in 2001 to 81 percent in 2012, the highest in American history. As a result 1.2 million students have been removed from the dropout environment and the goal of reaching a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020 is achievable.
But then, the wake-up call for California. The U.S. “cannot reach its 90 percent goal without California, the nation’s most populous state,” declared America’s Promise Alliance, which recently released its fifth annual update regarding the dropout crisis. So how are we going to attain this ambitious goal when there is still so much working against our students in the public school system?
Mahesh, a Microsoft employee, with his wife and son volunteering at City Year’s Day of Service at Overfelt High School last year
City Year has part of the answer. In San Jose and Silicon Valley we have 94 young adult City Year AmeriCorps members who are working fulltime in nine public schools. And collectively they’re having a real impact: last year 83% of students served demonstrated raw improvements in their literacy and math scores – and – we added 90 days of school to the calendar year for students through extended learning time.
While City Year’s program is making a measurable impact in the local community the need is still huge- and – goes well beyond these nine schools. Every year, more than 2,600 students in San Jose drop out of high school. Students who drop out are eight times more likely to become incarcerated and three times more likely to be unemployed. We must do more to end this cycle.
On the heels of a monumentally successful gala in October, City Year is excited to launch into even more Bay Area schools and serve thousands of additional students in East San Jose and the East Side Union High School District. As City Year continues to build on this forward momentum and invest further into our local schools and students, we look to you, our neighbors in the corporate and philanthropic communities, to join us.
Sign up here to join City Year and Microsoft’s Day of Service at Meyer Elementary on MLK Day.
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Toni Burke is Vice President and Executive Director of City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley, leading 94 AmeriCorps members serving in seven schools, impacting more than 4,400 students every day. Previously, she served as director of the Eli J. Segal Citizen Leadership Foundation, where she led a growing network of nearly 500 Segal Founders and Fellows in 10 different states. Burke completed her Master’s in Public Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Connecticut.
To learn more about Microsoft’s commitment to youth and education, visit our YouthSpark Hub or follow us on twitter at @msftcitizenship.
