Second Day of Community Service

Today we are going to Aspira charter school… I believe that it’s in North Philly.  Here is their website:  http://www.aspiracyber.org/Bilingual-Model.31.0.html

This school is special in the way that it chose to empower its students.  It is located in a predominantly latino community (Puerto Rican and Dominican communities).  It teaches half of its curriculum in Spanish and half of its curriculum in English.  It’s aim is to create bi-cultural, bilingual, biliterate students.  It is a fairly new school (four or five years old) so it’s academic effect cannot be readily measured yet.  Nonetheless, its social effect can definitely be seen by just talking to the students.  The students are very aware of their community and  how special it is to speak two languages with perfect fluency.  In turn, this empowers them.  They know who they are and what they want to keep ( as in language and heritage) throughout their life.  I think that this is phenomenal.  All throughout the United States, there are various campaigns to erase the “Spanish language from the children” to give the children only English, to basically steal a very strong component to “who they are” from them.  It is cultural genocide and it’s happening everywhere.  This is what makes this charter school special.  It’s trying to help the kids keep a very strong component to their family’s identity.

In this school, our job was to help set up a “lending” library.  At the moment, the school only had a room full of books where the students could sit down and read the books in the room but never take them home.  Our job was to classify every single book as fiction, nonfiction, chapter book etc.  bind them, assign them a code and enter them into the database and then shelve them.  It took two days and two teams to do this.  It was a tedious job but very rewarding.  We also got to meet the students and talk to some of their teachers.  To me this was a very powerful experience.  There was a very good quote at the entrance to the library that said “It is easier to build strong children than to repair a broken man” by Frederick Douglass.  And I couldn’t help but compare both the youth build students who had been drop outs to the much younger students in this charter school.   Was Youth build “repairing” their students enough in their one year there?  And is the Aspira charter school, and other schools like it, “building” strong enough children that will overcome all of the obstacles in their communities?