| Dear Friends, All eyes are on San Francisco this week and the results of the Board of Education recall. Rarely before has there been such overwhelming community leadership and voice in articulating our number one job as a city when it comes to education. We must provide our kids the focused resources and programs in our schools that empower learners to flourish. It is time to get down to business and ensure we are doing everything we can to recover from this pandemic, that we get our students caught up so we don’t have students who are continuing forward being 2-4 years behind grade level, that we do not accept having schools where only 8% of students can read, that we show up and ensure our students mentally, emotionally, and academically regain the ground lost during the past 20+ months. Here at the Ed Fund, this has been our priority since March 2020. We asked ourselves daily what our youth needed from us and that led us to leap into designing new supports to meet new needs. We raised and distributed thousands of dollars of Covid relief funds for families facing financial hardships; pivoted from our volunteer literacy tutoring program to instead focusing on a program that offers individualized tutoring to students from credentialed teachers; and increased students’ socio-emotional wellbeing toolkits by serving more classrooms than ever before with our mindfulness program. We have been mobilizing the community to help our students and their families rise above the myriad challenges and I am proud that with all of your support, we have gone from serving hundreds of students a year to thousands, increasing the number of students receiving literacy tutoring by 2,000%. And yet, the work is just beginning in terms of ensuring our students not just recover from this pandemic, but have the confidence and skills to truly thrive. Next week we will begin providing over 2,700 SFUSD elementary students with literacy tutoring three times a week through the end of the school year. In our district of 50,000, however, there are thousands more students who would benefit from this same support. Our community has spoken and we are as clear as ever that focusing on our students’ learning is top priority – will you help by donating today? In Community, Stacey Wang |
