NEWSRELEASE!!!!

UVU ALUM BRINGING WOLVERINE SPIRIT TO BROOKLYN CLASSROOM
Newrelease-October 1, 2009


The picture tacked to the bulletin board in Utah Valley University alumna Lindsay Staples’ Brooklyn, N.Y. classroom shows her alma mater with Mount Timpanogos glimmering in the background. Her students – a class of about 20 3rd graders, all of them black, all from one of the nation’s roughest neighborhoods – think it’s fake.

“They’ve never seen mountains like that,” Staples said. “They think it’s a fake picture.”

Staples, a 2006 graduate of UVU’s School of Education, teaches a class of mostly immigrant children at Achievement First East New York Elementary charter school. It’s a far cry from Utah, but Staples was well-prepared for her position teaching underprivileged children thanks to her experience at UVU, where students have to spend a few weeks of their junior year teaching at a highly diverse school in Utah.

“I always thought I wanted to go this route,” Staples said. “But I taught for two weeks at Escalante (Elementary School) in Salt Lake City and that totally sold me on it.”

As soon as she graduated, Staples took a position at Redwood Elementary School in Salt Lake, where her class was made up entirely of Hispanic students and a pair of Sudanese refugees. Now, in New York City, her class is almost exclusively the children of immigrants from Trinidad, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Ghana and other countries around the Caribbean and West Africa.

Because lack of education is epidemic in the Brooklyn neighborhood where she teaches, Staples said her school is focused on getting students to think about post-secondary education from day one. “Kindergarteners can tell you what college they want to attend,” Staples said. In fact, students at Achievement First East New York aren’t even called students – from the moment they walk through the doors they’re referred to as “scholars.”

As a result, each classroom in the school takes on the name and identity of a university or college around the country to keep students’ minds focused on their ultimate goal. Last year, Staples taught under the flag her co-teacher’s alma mater, Vassar College in New York, but this year her classroom is covered in Wolverine Green.

“I never thought I’d be using the University’s name again,” Staples said with a laugh. “But all day long it’s ‘Utah Valley do this,’ ‘UVU come over here.’”

The rest of the 3rd grade is Harvard, Columbia and the University of Massachusetts and the teachers instructing the classes hail from a wide range of backgrounds, including many who are either currently in or alumni of the Teach for America program, which places recent college graduates in urban and rural schools to help expand educational opportunity for the less fortunate children in our society. Staples said the school’s principal is a Jamaican immigrant who put himself through Columbia and Cornell and “is all about pushing these kids.”


The encouragement seems to be paying off, as the East New York school has posted excellent results in standardized test and recently graduated its first class with a very high percentage of them going to onto post-secondary education, according to Staples. Because of the nature of the charter school, students are chosen for acceptance in a blind lottery and there is a waiting list of more than 1,000 for Staples’ school.

“I went to the lottery last year and the auditorium was packed,” Staples said. “The families of the names that weren’t drawn were devastated. It’s a huge opportunity for them to come to this charter school”

The public high school in that area that primary schools fed into closed down a few years ago, Staples said, because graduation rates were so low and dropout rates were so high.

Staples’ multicultural experience may be at the extreme end of the spectrum, but studies and initiatives from Utah universities indicate that teachers increasingly find themselves in classrooms with large numbers of minority students. By 2050, one University of Utah study suggests, those minority groups might not be minorities at all.

That information prompted School of Education Dean Briant Farnsworth, Associate Dean Linda Pierce and Associate Professor Axel Ramirez to form the Latino Educators of Tomorrow program to identify high school juniors and seniors who want to become teachers and support them through the remainder of high school and their college careers. Thanks in part to that program, there are currently 11 Latino students enrolled in professional education programs at UVU.

Back in Brooklyn, Staples might as well be teaching in Utah Valley with all the Wolverine Green being flashed around her classroom. Word of her very young UVU class bounced around the University and T-shirts, posters and other UVU information was sent to the help decorate the UVU Brooklyn campus. Staples has even posted a YouTube video of her class chanting “UVU,” something they do each Friday during a reading circle workshop with other classes to work on citizenship skills. Because so many of her students are the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves, Staples said much of the curriculum is about immigration and American society and citizenship.

If teaching in an environment like East New York sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. Staples’ school day is extended, lasting from 7:15 a.m. until 4 p.m. with after-school programs after that. Maximizing the kids’ time in school not only increases their exposure to the curriculum, it decreases their exposure to the rough streets outside.

“It’s one of the most rewarding jobs you could ever have,” Staples said. “You work to death but you also love it to death. It’s motivating to go into a job where you leave every day feeling like you made a difference.”

And as far as college is concerned, Staples has a group of 3rd graders who are pretty well sold on Utah as their choice for higher education.

“They all know their graduation date,” Staples said. “In 2022 they’ll be graduating from UVU.”