Below is Nell Schafers story about working with an educational support organization for low-income youth:
Nell Schafer is an intern at CEP, Community Education Partnerships, an organization that focuses on providing learning opportunities and improving academic success for homeless and highly mobile youth in the Bay Area. In high school, Nell volunteered as a teachers assistant at a low-income elementary school. Through this experience, Nell saw the effects of low-income households on children's education. In which the educational gap is heightened for homeless or highly mobile children.
The Bay Area and California in general has a high number of homelessness; there are nearly 300,000 homeless youths in California. CEP’s mission is to close the educational gap that may be associated with homelessness by providing educational resources. CEP offers virtual one-on-one tutoring to students during shelter-in-place. In addition, they help students access computers, internet, school supplies, and other learning tools. One of CEP’s core values is that homelessness shouldn’t be an obstacle to learning; Nell believes the work done in CEP allows youth to meet this value by providing them with necessary resources to lessen this obstacle. During COVID-19 their work has been especially important because remote learning, consequently, widens the educational gap. Nell notes that though remote learning isn’t the same as in-person learning, education, in general, is essential to homeless students because they tend to be below their grade level. Nell notes that “only 17% of homeless 8th grade students are proficient at reading and 15% are proficient at math”.
Though Nell hasn’t been able to see the impacts of CEP first-hand due to COVID-19, Nell has had the opportunity to learn about homeless in the Bay Area and the influence CEP has. Nell enjoys running CEP’s social media accounts and learning about other great services and organizations within the Bay Area.
For more information about CEP, visit their website http://www.cep.ngo/
Written by Nancy Deng on 8/7/2020
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