In the Avenues West neighborhood of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Academy of Sciences is tucked away behind the Marquette University campus. On a cold, snowy evening, most lights are off and doors locked, except for the main entrance where a single door is left open.
Two workers sit at the front desk with a couple students waiting in nearby chairs to be picked up from school. However, there are a few middle and high school students passing through the inner locked door to get to their after-school programs.
Inside the newly constructed STEAM lab, which was funded by the Harley-Davidson Motor Company is a stark white, cement room decorated with metal tables and accented lime green chairs that can hold roughly 20 students.
On this day, 10 students in 6th to 8th grade are bouncing around the space participating it the Teen Program. Running from person to person, the students proudly show off their tiny boats made of toothpicks, tape and paper.
The boats are helping them learn about buoyancy.
It’s disguised learning
– Allison Vasquez-Lovell
This is the first year that the Boys and Girls Club has partnered with AmeriCorps to work in 10 Milwaukee County schools to increase academic and career support for students.
The AmeriCorps partnership includes programs called Inspire HOPE, EARN and Academic Career Planning.
These programs focus on academic mentoring and tutoring, and also on successful transitioning to post-secondary opportunities through help with FAFSA, financial aid and college applications. Also, recognizing that some students will head straight into the work force without a college degree, some programs work on developing trade skills, resume building, interview skills and financial management.
“So, it’s a future, forward-looking support,” said Joe Schmidkofer, associate director of grants administration at the Boys and Girls Club.
Using the AmeriCorps members provides “additional resources that are needed for our students to get more individualized services,” said Vasquez-Lovell.
That target number of impacted students will continue to grow throughout the years, according to Schmidkofer.
The importance of reaching as many students as possible with additional support is because “if more education and more training equals a better job, then no education and no training equals a bad job,” said Allison Vasquez-Lovell, the AmeriCorps program contact for the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee. “That means an increase of poverty.”
New Program Funding
Recently, Serve Wisconsin awarded Wisconsin $7.1 million in funding for 29 AmeriCorps programs and more than 900 members throughout the state, according to AmeriCorps. The funding is from the Corporation for National and Community Service, a national agency “committed to improving lives, strengthening communities, and fostering civic engagement,” according to the website.
Serve Wisconsin works with the AmeriCorps to meet critical needs throughout the states, such as educational achievement, homelessness, health access and economic opportunity, according to the website.
A presentation for AmeriCorps grant applicants says that grants are awarded to programs that demonstrate an evidence-based or evidence-informed approach to improving communities. That means that it can provide proof that an intervention method to address the problem is being done through impact evaluations, research studies on the method or past performances.
The State Service Commission reviews the materials and then allocates funding to each program.
These additional funds from Serve Wisconsin to the Boys and Girls Club allows 24 AmeriCorps members to support students within MPS schools, according to Vasquez-Lovell.
Focusing on academic and career planning is in response to recent state-wide test scores. The results from the Wisconsin Students Assessment System exams released by the Department of Public Instruction show that only 39% of students were classified as proficient or advanced in English and 40% in math, a decrease from previous years.
Specifically, the MPS 2018-2019 district report card shows that the district meets few state academic expectations. Student achievement in English Language Arts and Mathematics only got a combined score of 32.4 compared to the state’s 62.3 score. MPS schools received a 67.7 score for on-track and post-secondary readiness, a whole 17.1 points below the state level readiness score.
AmeriCorps primarily works with MPS high schools, which holds students to the Common Core State Standards for math, reading and English Language Arts. Those standards provide clear and consistent learning goals to help prepare students for college, career and life.
A Calling To Join AmeriCorps
Ge’Kayla Telford, a UWM alum, started working with the Boys and Girls Club in 2016 and then transitioned in October to work with them as an AmeriCorps member.
I wanted to reach and impact kids my own way
– Ge’Kayla Telford
Her role is to act as a liaison from middle school to high school, tutor students and work with them during the Milwaukee Academy of Science after-school program.
Along with getting satisfaction by inspiring students, Telford also gets benefits from working with AmeriCorps.
Each member receives a living allowance and an educational award. The Segal AmeriCorps Educational Award can be used at any time after completion of service to pay educational expenses.
But most members don’t sign up for the benefits.
“I wanted to be a part of something where I actually felt like I was making a difference,” Sabrina Johnkins, an AmeriCorps NCCC Traditional Corps member and UWM alum, wrote in an email.
Currently, she is stationed at the Southern Region Campus in Team Delta 3. She is serving in Richwood, W.V., helping to rebuild a home that was flooded in 2016.
Johnkins’ team consists of seven members serving for 10 months. Members travel around the assigned region and provide services including disaster recovery, infrastructure improvement, environmental stewardship, and Energy Conservation.
Sabrina Johnkins and her team work on reconstructing a home in Richwood, WV. Photos courtesy of Sabrina Johnkins
“Every day I truly feel like I am making a difference in the communities I serve in,” stated Johnkins. “I am able to learn new skills, every single day, and do things that I never thought possible.”
Community Partnerships
Working with community partners that specialize in areas where students struggle the most allows the AmeriCorps to provide students with even more resources, often highlighting skills that are interchangeable for trade work or further pursuit of education in fields such as engineering.
A partnership with Harley-Davidson provided the Milwaukee Academy of Sciences a grant to create the STEAM lab because they saw a future gap within their company when their older employees start to retire. They hope to provide teens with these skills now because they can use them to get into that trade career later, said Rachel Nabors, college career development program coordinator at the Boys and Girls Club.
STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics, which are core areas where students struggle. This STEAM initiative was designed to address concerns that parents, employers and educators deemed critical to a child’s future, according to the Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM.
Next to the STEAM lab is the Harley-Davidson room where girls construct tiny Lego motorcycles with each block in red, green, blue, white or yellow. After finishing the motorcycles, the five girls placed them on a floor ramp to watch them zoom down.
The lesson is the importance of product testing and an introduction the predominately male field of engineering.
AmeriCorps’ History of Public Service
In 1933, President Bill Clinton signed the National and Community Service Trust Act which created the AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Then Serve Wisconsin was established in 1994 under an executive order from Governor Tommy G. Thompson.
The order states that Wisconsin’s National and Community Service Commission is to encourage service and volunteer participation to “promote service, provide training and allocation of resources to programs that enrich lives and communities through service and volunteering,” according to the mission statement.
In Wisconsin, there have been 771 AmeriCorps members serving, which counts for over 934,000 hours of service in communities throughout the state during the 2018-2019 program year, according to Serve Wisconsin. The group reports that this contributed to 2,900 students improving their academic performance, 934 students completing after-school programs, and 956 students completing literacy programs and 265 students completing mathematic tutoring.
When it comes to cities that produce the most AmeriCorps members, Milwaukee residents rank seventh among large American cities, according to Serve Wisconsin.
Currently, 400 members serve in Milwaukee; in the 25-year history of AmeriCorps, more than 5,800 residents have served.
Starting in January, the Boys and Girls Club and AmeriCorps will be deploying new cohorts into the community to help reach the goal of helping 300 students.