Almost all of the students at Jackson Elementary School are poor. They don’t have the advantages your children have. But your kids probably can’t ride a unicycle.
Growing up in Minnesota, Megan Phillips won a national championship as part of the Twin Cities Unicycle Club. When the Teach for America alum arrived at Jackson, she decided to form a unicycle club.
“Our children will be able to unicycle, and no one else can,” she says. “They perform a little bit. They can do some tricks.”
When Phillips was studying at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., she coached the speech team at a wealthy nearby school with a marble foyer, multiple auditoriums and its own radio station.
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“That’s when I decided to do Teach for America, because I saw what these kids had, and realized that was not who I needed to be working with,” she says. “I felt like, ‘They don’t really need me here.’”
In Jackson, much like Baton Rouge, the middle class largely has deserted the public-school system. Part of the problem, Phillips says, is that people don’t know about the good things going on at her school. For the past two years, for example, the school undertook a major fundraising effort and sent 25 to 30 students to Washington, D.C.
“When people realize something like that is going on in the public schools, something that may not even be going on in the private schools, hopefully they’ll be willing to give us a chance,” she says.
But while she dislikes that test scores seem to be the only measure of school quality these days, she knows that higher scores help to establish credibility. At Jackson, she says raising behavioral expectations for the students, and rewarding them when they meet those expectations, has led to better academic performance.
“That is where the revolution in education needs to happen now,” Phillips says. “Instruction really has to be individualized for every kid. It can’t be one size fits all. We can’t let kids fall through the cracks.”
Age: 29
What is Baton Rouge’s biggest strength in the quest to attract young professionals? “There are a lot of job opportunities in the area. The culture is completely unique; you can’t find anywhere else like Louisiana. The revival of downtown; downtown is more of a place that would attract young professionals.”
Click here for the complete list of 2009's Forty Under 40 winners.
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