Centre students enriched by teaching experience

RELEASED: September 13, 2007

DANVILLE, KY—Senior Stephanie Lawler and sophomore Jasmon Dixon interned this past summer with the Breakthrough Collaborative, a national non-profit that increases educational opportunity for high-potential, low-income middle school students and inspires outstanding college and high school students to pursue careers in education.

Consistently featured as a top-10 internship by The Princeton Review, Breakthrough's innovative students-teaching-students model partners middle school students with college and high school students who serve as teachers, role models and mentors.

"I had one of the greatest summers of my life teaching middle-schoolers in Norfolk, Va.," said Lawler, a Tampa, Fla., native. "I worked with a great group of teachers from around the country and taught an exciting and creative group of 73 students from the Norfolk public schools.

"I'm an economics major, which I used to my advantage in the classroom," Lawler continued. "Breakthrough encourages teachers to incorporate their interests into the classroom. I tried to bring economics into the classroom through different activities, like reading a newspaper article about the shortage of babysitters in Washington, D.C., and then graphing the data."

Lawler taught algebra to seventh graders and English to ninth graders. When she wasn't making lesson plans and preparing weekly activities, she and the other teachers traveled and made the most of their time in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area.

Dixon, of Evansville, Ind., was equally enthusiastic about his Breakthrough experience.
"I taught seventh-grade biology at a middle school in San Jose, Calif.," he said. "I had my own classroom, students and even my own desk.

"I chose [Breakthrough] because I'm interested in education and also because it helps underprivileged kids overcome adversity. It's also the third most sought after internship in the nation.

"Patrick Noltemeyer, Centre director of volunteer services, helped me prepare for the internship, Dixon said. "He's always a big help when I'm looking to do some volunteer service. Right now we're working on building the Danville Environment Academic Enrichment program for kids, in an effort to promote environmentally conscious kids and to advance children's life science skills."

Drawn from the public school system, 89 percent of Breakthrough's students are students of color and 65 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch programs. English is a second language for 27 percent of the students, and most will be the first in their families to attend college.

Breakthrough was founded in San Francisco in 1978 as Summerbridge and serves more than 2,200 middle school students and employs 700 college and high school students in 28 locations across the United States.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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