Starting Education Nonprofit for Teacher Learning
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Hello everyone, and thank you for visiting our GoFundMe page!
We are looking for your help with founding a new non-profit organization to improve our schools and empower our teachers.
The new organization will be focused on three key steps to make education more effective for everyone.
o Create and distribute high-quality curricula, for FREE – teachers frequently have a lack of access to high-quality curricula. Often, they have to find it on their own and pay for it using their own money or actively seek out colleagues or mentors - this is hard for them because the first year or two of teaching is overwhelming and exhausting.
o Create explicit guidance for implementation - clear tools and instructions on how to effectively design and teach lessons and units, determine authentic student learning outcomes, align assessments meaningfully to learning goals, and move through/survive the day-to-day realities of teaching to integrate new curricula into their classrooms.
o Develop teacher skills – Professional development for teachers on creating and implementing a quality curriculum. Many teachers do not have the opportunity to learn these skills in their teacher-preparation programs.
My dream for the past several years has been to start an education non-profit to address serious shortcomings that I and fellow teachers face in our education system. I have observed and experienced these issues from multiple perspectives, as a teacher, professor, administrator, and parent, and it has driven me to do something about it. After three years of planning, discussion, and collaborating with my good friend and teacher colleague KC, I've mustered enough courage to make this dream a reality.
And so, we're asking for some funds to help get us started. Here's what we need for the short-term:
1) $300 to pay for the cost of starting the non-profit
2) $200 for legal advisement for the paperwork and various filing requirements
3) $800 for 2 video equipment to film both high school ELA and science classes in action (our goal is to film EVERY DAY of the school year if we can)
4) $200 to get our website up and running - we are going to create it ourselves using Wordpress, most likely, but we'll need to buy a domain name and pay for web hosting initially.
We would also be interested in people willing to donate expertise for web design, branding, logos, or general infrastructure.
This will help us with the setup for the non-profit organization and the seed of our curricula and tools. Our plan is to use those to lay the groundwork for a more extensive outreach that can enable the organization to grow to a scale that can impact the quality of teaching in California and beyond.
Who we are:
Donna Scarlett:
I'm a teacher-education professor with a Doctorate of Education from the University of San Francisco. I am a former high school English teacher and mentor/coach for novice teachers. Over my 21 years in education, I've worked in and observed teaching and learning in multiple contexts: urban, suburban, and rural, public, private, and charter schools, and international schools in El Salvador and the Netherlands. I have led the creation and accreditation of teacher-preparation programs and have worked with the California Department of Education. I also provide consulting services through my personal company, Scarlett Education.
KC Jones:
KC’s science expertise encompasses five years of biochemistry research and 15 years of high school science teaching. He has been part of the design team for establishing two high schools. KC also ran the Salk Mobile Science Program, a county program in California bringing researchers to middle schools for hands-on biotech labs. He has collaborated with Stanford University’s science department to design a laboratory using cell-free protein synthesis technology and then implemented this lab design successfully with 120 high school students (and at the time fewer than 100 people in the world had ever done cell-free protein synthesis). KC has worked with cohorts of teachers and administrators to design and implement a teacher choice professional development model that focuses on the work realities of teachers. Currently, KC mentors student, intern, and early-career science teachers and teaches high school science in San Francisco.
We are looking for your help with founding a new non-profit organization to improve our schools and empower our teachers.
The new organization will be focused on three key steps to make education more effective for everyone.
o Create and distribute high-quality curricula, for FREE – teachers frequently have a lack of access to high-quality curricula. Often, they have to find it on their own and pay for it using their own money or actively seek out colleagues or mentors - this is hard for them because the first year or two of teaching is overwhelming and exhausting.
o Create explicit guidance for implementation - clear tools and instructions on how to effectively design and teach lessons and units, determine authentic student learning outcomes, align assessments meaningfully to learning goals, and move through/survive the day-to-day realities of teaching to integrate new curricula into their classrooms.
o Develop teacher skills – Professional development for teachers on creating and implementing a quality curriculum. Many teachers do not have the opportunity to learn these skills in their teacher-preparation programs.
My dream for the past several years has been to start an education non-profit to address serious shortcomings that I and fellow teachers face in our education system. I have observed and experienced these issues from multiple perspectives, as a teacher, professor, administrator, and parent, and it has driven me to do something about it. After three years of planning, discussion, and collaborating with my good friend and teacher colleague KC, I've mustered enough courage to make this dream a reality.
And so, we're asking for some funds to help get us started. Here's what we need for the short-term:
1) $300 to pay for the cost of starting the non-profit
2) $200 for legal advisement for the paperwork and various filing requirements
3) $800 for 2 video equipment to film both high school ELA and science classes in action (our goal is to film EVERY DAY of the school year if we can)
4) $200 to get our website up and running - we are going to create it ourselves using Wordpress, most likely, but we'll need to buy a domain name and pay for web hosting initially.
We would also be interested in people willing to donate expertise for web design, branding, logos, or general infrastructure.
This will help us with the setup for the non-profit organization and the seed of our curricula and tools. Our plan is to use those to lay the groundwork for a more extensive outreach that can enable the organization to grow to a scale that can impact the quality of teaching in California and beyond.
Who we are:
Donna Scarlett:
I'm a teacher-education professor with a Doctorate of Education from the University of San Francisco. I am a former high school English teacher and mentor/coach for novice teachers. Over my 21 years in education, I've worked in and observed teaching and learning in multiple contexts: urban, suburban, and rural, public, private, and charter schools, and international schools in El Salvador and the Netherlands. I have led the creation and accreditation of teacher-preparation programs and have worked with the California Department of Education. I also provide consulting services through my personal company, Scarlett Education.
KC Jones:
KC’s science expertise encompasses five years of biochemistry research and 15 years of high school science teaching. He has been part of the design team for establishing two high schools. KC also ran the Salk Mobile Science Program, a county program in California bringing researchers to middle schools for hands-on biotech labs. He has collaborated with Stanford University’s science department to design a laboratory using cell-free protein synthesis technology and then implemented this lab design successfully with 120 high school students (and at the time fewer than 100 people in the world had ever done cell-free protein synthesis). KC has worked with cohorts of teachers and administrators to design and implement a teacher choice professional development model that focuses on the work realities of teachers. Currently, KC mentors student, intern, and early-career science teachers and teaches high school science in San Francisco.
Organizer
Donna Hyatt Scarlett
Organizer
San Francisco, CA
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