Heather, Mike and I met with the key full time leadership of the Durham Public School Systems today. At our lunch were Carl Harris (Superintendent), Terri Mozingo (Chief Academic Officer), Deborah Pittman(Assistant Superintendent, Student Services), Kay Williams (Executive Director, Public Affairs), Steve Toler (Consultant to DPS) and Sheila Miglarese (Volunteer Services Coordinator).

This is the 2nd time that we’ve met with Dr. Harris. The first time was back in August when we discussed two things:

0. funding and sponsoring an initiative along with www.donorschoose.org to encourage private funding of individual DPS teacher initiatives; we committed at that time to fund $20,000 for a matching program to encourage public participation - and I’ll talk more about that in another post later
0. the needs and opportunities for volunteers in DPS so that we we can work hard to promote awareness of volunteering programs from among the 5 outreaches of DurhamCares (website, workplace, churches, schools and neighborhoods).

Today was the follow up meeting to this initial conversation. Dr. Harris arranged to meet with us and the folks listed above, and it was a productive conversation.

It’s our hope that we can ramp to a target of 1,000 new volunteers in DPS by next Fall. That sounds like a lofty goal, but it’s a function of getting the word out. The stakes are incredibly high. DPS teaches our kids, the leaders of tomorrow. The question is whether they will be future gang leaders or future Durham community leaders. Which side will win? Well, we’re hoping that we ALL get a chance to stack the odds in favor of the second. Stay tuned to the website to find out how about RIL and AVID and other great volunteering programs with DPS.

Have ideas/thoughts yourselves? We’d love to hear them.

There are no comments for this entry yet.