At almost any point during the school day you can witness City Year scattered about the hall working diligently at tables with our students, reading out loud, playing interactive literacy games, and striving to provide our students with strong reading comprehension, vocabulary and fluency skills. While using the City Year literacy frameworks, tools and methods has become a fairly smooth and useful process for us in our interventions, this was not always the case.

Three months ago the picture was quite different…

In September, City Year had trained us, and provided us with the frameworks and the tools to perform effective interventions with the students, but we were missing one key component, solid relationships between students and Corps Members. We had only been in schools a couple weeks, the students were still getting to know us and us them. I had six students total on my literacy focus list; I decided to pull students out for interventions in two groups of three. My two groups were as different as night and day. One of my groups began very smoothly, and they responded well to the City Year lesson plan structure, while my other group was not so smooth. They were very distracted and bored during our sessions, so they didn’t respond well to what I was doing in those first interventions.

I decided to look to my teammates for help, and utilize some of their best practices. As we all got to know our students better and develop stronger bonds, we learned how to adjust the City Year literacy frameworks to better meet our students’ needs and diverse learning styles. I soon learned that the group I was having more trouble with was full of kinesthetic, hands-on learners, who respond well to interactive, high-energy activities.

Here are some activities we now use:

•Vocab Baseball and Basketball: these infuse competition and sports terminology into learning vocabulary.

•Vobackulary: a group game where you take a few vocabulary words, write them on post-its or note cards, stick them to your students’ backs, and ask the other students to describe the word on the student’s back until the student can guess what it is.

•Word Count Per Minute Goal Setting: only used during fluency lessons

•Drawing pictures: for vocabulary engagement or reading comprehension

•Writing raps and rhymes

Games like these engaged my distracted, kinetic learners and made our interventions fun! As our relationships have grown stronger with our students, we’ve gained more confidence, and learned to tap into our own creativity. My advice to current and future Corps Members when it comes to literacy tutoring, don’t be afraid to make it fun! Students, like us, learn in all different ways, through games and different mediums, and if you aren’t sure if it will work with your students, just try it.

-Ashley Knight, Rockwell Automation Team, Rogers Street Academy

In the morning we began our day at the CY MKE headquarters, where we were introduced to Luke Fickbohm, the Civic Engagement Project Leader, and Kara Navin, the External Affairs and Communications Associate for CY MKE. After a briefing by Luke on the event details, he led us in prep. We sorted tools and materials needed for each one of the 24 different projects to be completed on MLK Day. After lunch we took the materials to Alexander Hamilton High School, and had a walk-through of the project. That evening we began preparatory work, which included cutting wood, sketching murals, and ensuring all projects the supplies needed in order to be successful.

Friday morning we started at Hamilton, along with over 60 City Year Milwaukee Corps Members and staff, to complete remaining prep work. After prep, we went with the CY MKE “village” (Staff and Senior Corps) to McBob’s, a restaurant in the North side of Milwaukee.  McBob’s has a fish fry every Tuesday and Friday night, and is a Care Force & CY MKE ‘tradition’ to go there, as this is the third year Care Force went to Milwaukee to assist with the MLK Day Service event.

On Saturday we began later in the morning, giving everyone some time to catch up with sleep lost over the first few days. Starting out at the school we were able to complete the prep work. Sunday we were fortunate to have the day off, but still united as a team for brunch with the Milwaukee Senior Corps Members. After visiting with them, we took a trip with Luke to Oriental Landmark Lanes, a bowling alley on the Upper East Side of Milwaukee built in 1927. We enjoyed a few games of bowling and then headed to ‘Replay’d’, a restaurant nearby, to eat dinner and watch the Patriots game.

Monday, January 16^th was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and our service event in remembrance of his legacy. Well over 300 volunteers attended from a variety of organizations, companies, and universities. After opening program, City Year Milwaukee’s project coordinators lead volunteers into service. The volunteers painted over 100 murals, built benches and a school sign for the main entrance, painted garbage cans the school colors to raise school spirit made the day a huge success.

I enjoyed this trip because of the differences from a typical Care Force trip, and the opportunity to participate in another site-based event. Sharing a place with fellow senior corps in their city was a unique experience and I appreciated learning about the perspectives of Milwaukee from people who are actively involved in the city. Observing volunteers come from across the state to serve on MLK Jr. Day inspired me and made me proud to be a part of it.

Peter Christophersen
Senior Corps Member
Team Care Force

On the day our nation sets aside to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy, I was honored today to join the City Year Washington D.C. Corps in a day of service alongside U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Director of AmeriCorps, John Gomperts, Washington D.C.’s Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Mayor Vincent Gray, Chancellor of Schools Kaya Henderson and City Council Chairman Kwame Brown.

 All told, 1,000 individuals—200 City Year AmeriCorps members and 800 volunteers—joined together to help revitalize the grounds of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., by painting murals, building bookshelves, hosting a career workshop, and organizing a neighborhood clean-up. 

 Our service day at Dunbar was part of a national day of service in honor of Dr. King, observed by 2000 corps members and 8000 volunteers through service projects at all 21 City Year locations.  

 It was an apt setting for today’s powerful day of service in honor of Dr. King: Dunbar High School was the first public high school for African American students in America, founded in 1870

 Addressing the City Year AmeriCorps members and volunteers, Secretary Duncan called education “the civil rights issue of our time.”  He went on to say, “we have to embrace tension. We have to challenge the status quo. We have to make sure that every child gets a quality education. Then, when we are doing that, we will be doing real service.”

 Praising City Year corps members today, Secretary Duncan said: “I think City Year embodies Dr. King’s dream.” 

 Indeed, Dr. King’s vision of a “beloved community” was a founding inspiration for City Year, and I, too, am continually inspired by our corps of young idealists, and by the life, legacy and dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.

 Not only on this national day of service, but every school day in classrooms and schools across the country, City Year AmeriCorps members are striving to help our country achieve Dr. King’s vision of social justice and economic opportunity for all—through fulltime service in high-poverty schools. 

 They are serving in order to address the nation’s dropout crisis—helping students improve their attendance, behavior, and course performance and keeping them in school and on track to graduation.

 With over a million students dropping out of high school ever year, it is a crisis that we need, urgently, to solve.  Alarmingly, high school dropouts are three times more likely to be unemployed and eight times more likely to be incarcerated.  This is especially true in communities of color where some schools have been low-performing for several generations.

 National service has a powerful role to play when it comes to turning around our nation’s lowest performing schools and increasing the urban graduation pipeline.  In partnership with school district leaders, principals, teachers, and non-profit partners, we are continuing to see very promising results in the schools where we serve.

 It was with Secretary Duncan that, in 2009, City Year announced our In School and on Track initiative, our plan to scale those results to reach the majority of off-track students nation-wide.  As we celebrate Dr. King today, we embrace that goal with an even stronger sense of urgency, what Dr. King called right, “the fierce urgency of now.”

 I would like to express my deep gratitude to the 2,000 City Year AmeriCorps corps members and thousands of volunteers nationwide who dedicated the day brightening schools, community centers, and playgrounds. 

 Thank you for contributing to Dr. King’s “beloved community” today and every day.

 Yours in service,

Michael Brown

As the Recruitment Project Leader, I am, in some ways, the face of City Year. I am an applicant’s first contact; the first person they build a relationship with, and hopefully, become a big part of the reason they decided to apply for such a challenging but rewarding experience.  Even though this is far from tutoring a student with math and reading, I am still constantly reminded of why I am here. My job as a recruiter has one very specific goal: Inspire others to give a year of service with City Year and the Milwaukee community. I give presentations, lead information sessions, table at career and college fairs and head up the customer service aspect of recruiting.

When completing these tasks, I often reminisce on what brought me to City Year, the countless experiences I have had and lessons I have learned. I was a lost young high school graduate who was passionate about social justice and was looking for an adventure before going off to college. I jumped right into a year of service and had the humbling privilege of impacting the lives of others. All of these things make my task of recruiting so much easier. I have the privilege of sharing my story with potential corps members in the hopes that they will be inspired to give a year to the great children of Milwaukee and gain as much as I did in the process. It means a lot when potential corps members start their application because they are inspired by my story and I hope to continue inspiring people to join the front lines of City Year.

This year has been a definite shift from my work last year, but they are tied together. It is very rewarding to look back on my 17 months of service and know that I am affecting the lives of others in both of my roles with City Year. Whether it was helping a student reach their full potential academically or inspiring a confirmed 2012-2013 corps member to apply to Milwaukee, I am making a difference in the lives of people. I will take all of the lessons I have learned with this great organization as a corps member and now as the Recruitment Project Leader and continue on my path of service.

- Jeff Wheatley-Heckman, Recruitment Project Leader, City Year Milwaukee