Departments
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Week of 9 October 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 9 |
Feature
Article
Athletes Committed to Educating Students
BU grads team up with professional sports for education
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What started as an idea between two BU graduates in 1994 is now a nonprofit organization that requires over 200 staff and volunteers to implement -- in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Chicago, Boston, and Providence.
Drawing on the popularity of professional athletes and children's fervent interest in them, Athletes Committed to Educating Students (ACES), an after-school tutoring/mentoring program serving 500 inner-city children, is different from other programs. It does not just help students finish their homework or only provide recreation; ACES provides a separate curriculum that uses sports as an academic teaching tool.
Professional sports teams such as the Chicago Bears, Minnesota Twins, and Boston Celtics are cofounders of the program, providing support in the form of up-front funding and participants. Athletes and front-office personnel alike, Wennig says, donate time to the program.
Principals and teachers in participating schools select low-income children who show promise, but who are in need of extra nurturing. In addition to the public education that the children receive, ACES offers its own curriculum of reading, writing, and math lessons, in accordance with state guidelines.
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Rajiv Shah, president of
ACES, and Matt Walbeck, previously of the Minnesota
Twins, in an inner-city classroom.
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Although Shah was raised in the United States, he was born in Uganda, where his family was well-educated and wealthy. Shah's father set a precedent of disciplined, ambitious humanitarianism for his son.
Among his many accomplishments, Shah's father was president of the Kampala Roundtable, which sponsored the President's Polio Appeal Fund, the effort that immunized all Ugandan children under the age of five in the late '60s and early '70s. The elder Shah met with Pope Paul VI on his visit to Uganda in 1969, and as a result, the Pope donated a large sum of money to the campaign. The President's Polio Appeal also provided wheelchairs and crutches free of charge for people who had already contracted polio.
"With my family, education has always been primary," Shah says. "In 1972, when Idi Amin decided all Asian Indians had to leave Uganda, overnight my family went from being wealthy to having nothing. Some of us moved to England, some to the United States, but everyone has been able to rebuild because of education."
Shah's respect for education manifests itself in both educating and being educated. He is president of ACES and on the board of directors for the ACES Minneapolis/St. Paul programs, and he is also a third year medical student at the University of Minnesota. Shah plans to continue serving on the board of directors after he becomes a doctor.
"The personalities in the sports arena are such a drawing card for kids," Shah says. "Out of gratitude for education's role in our families' lives, we wanted to channel the children's energy into a positive academic program. Rhoda developed a curriculum, and I was able to call on a high-level contact with one of the sports teams in Minnesota."
Since the first ACES pilot program in Minneapolis in 1994, the television program Inside Stuff has featured ACES each year. Jennifer Wennig, project coordinator of ACES in Chicago, was working in a public relations job when she saw the show in 1996. "I knew one of the producers and gave him a call. He put me in touch with Rhoda Au," Wennig says. "It was exactly the kind of work I wanted to do."
Wennig has worked as both an administrator and a teacher for ACES. She says that the children respond very well to the kind of learning environment ACES provides. "Last year, for example, Mike Dulaney of the Chicago Bears came," she says. "The team office sent his biography, which we rewrote as a narrative. The kids read the story aloud in groups, circled words they didn't know, and picked five of those words. We want them to define difficult words by their context."
Students then brainstormed about interview questions to ask Dulaney. When he arrived, the children stood, introduced themselves, and interviewed him in a press conference format. He taught them how to line up on a football field, and everyone practiced kicking and catching the ball. The children measured and logged the distances they had kicked. They figured out who had the longest kick, by how much, and what the average kick was. They also used Dulaney's previous year's playing record to figure percentages. Wennig says all of these exercises characterize the kind of work ACES does.
The long-term goal of ACES is to be self-sufficient. Shah says the organization plans to market its curriculum to other children's programs. "Unlike many others, we are going to stay with kids from elementary school through high school," he says. "This is what distinguishes us -- in addition to having our own academic requirements."
"Our hope is to cut out all spending on fundraising," Shah says, "and support ourselves by profits made on the ACES curriculum."
For more information, e-mail rajiv.r.shah-1@tc.umn.edu or call toll free 1-888-383 ACES (2237).