Check out your Company Bowl for anonymous work chats.
September 19, 2023, was National Voter Registration Day. To mark the occasion, Lety Gomez, Senior Education Organizer for Rocketship Texas, tells us why the ability to participate in the electoral process is not only a privilege, but also a key way we can affect change in our communities, states, and country. Read more:
Why Voting Matters
Executive Director of Rocketship Wisconsin, Kadeem Gill, M.Ed., is a testament to the positive impact of special education services, having benefited from them as a child before going on to graduate from Princeton University. As an educator today, he passionately advocates for lawmakers to place greater emphasis on enhancing special education funding. Read more:
Op Ed: More Special Education Funding Is Needed
Our mission and impact are not just about the students in our classrooms, it’s also about their families’ journeys to a better future. It’s about parents like Eva Heredia, a Founding Parent and Parent Leader at Rocketship Discovery Prep. Eva's journey as a mother and advocate reflects the heart and soul of our mission to unleash the full potential of our students, families, and communities. 🌱 Eva’s eldest daughter, Esperanza, went from a challenging start before Rocketship to being accepted at the University of California, Irvine. Esperanza and Eva’s success stories are a testament to the dedication of our educators, the possibilities of our school model, the strength of our community, and the power of our parents. Read more about their journey here:
Watering Planted Seeds
As community schools, we deeply engage our families in their student’s academic life and build our school community around our families. Our Care Corps is an expansion of Rocketship’s community schools model, allowing us to support the whole child and families inside and outside of the classroom. Our full-time Care Corps coordinators help our families navigate support systems and get the assistance they need by overcoming language barriers, red tape, and lack of internet access to connect them to vital services that are too often cumbersome and complicated. Care Corps coordinators are fully dedicated to helping families meet their basic needs so their children can thrive in school. We’re so proud to have once again holistically served thousands of families through Care Corps in the 2022-2023 school year. Read all about it:
What Our Community Schools Did This Year
“... the real opportunity to unlock Parent Power doesn’t come from a traditional [parent-teacher organization] structure. It comes by reframing education as something we do with families instead of to them. It comes by honoring parents as their child’s first teacher and lifelong advocate.” Read more from William Hill, Executive Director of Rocketship Public Schools Tennessee:
A major new Stanford CREDO study of over 3 million public school students found students at public charter schools outperform traditional public school students. And the study highlighted Rocketship Public Schools as one of the charter sector’s “gap-busting” networks that are providing empirical proof that high-quality public education is possible anywhere. Learn more:
Major New Stanford Study Highlights "Gap Busting" Public Charter Schools
At Rocketship, every student and staff members kicks off the day with a dance part - a ritual we call Launch. Each day we say our Rocketship chant and declare proudly that we are all persistent and responsible Rocketeers who are respectful of each other and empathetic to our world. After that we sing – or rather, we scream – a song that inspires us to display a specific core value. We close with a choreographed dance party with all of our Rocketeers. Students and parents learn a new awesome dance designed by teachers so no one stands awkwardly on the sidelines. Launch gives Rocketeers the opportunity to be goofy, loud and share a positive experience that prepares them for a successful day at school. Here's a glimpse of why parents love it at Rocketship DC!
At Rocketship DC, We Start Every Day with a Party Party. Welcome to Launch!
As Daiana Lambrecht, our Senior Director of Parent Leadership & Advocacy, says: At Rocketship, a key organizing principle we lean on is “Power is taken, not given.” We harness power within our families because we see them: we see their power, their resiliency and desire to give their children access to better opportunities regardless of the ZIP code they live in. So we collectively advocate to change our entrenched systems of inequity. One key way we do this is through our parent leadership program where parents are equipped with tools and training to ensure their voices are heard in the community. In this video, you'll meet Yolanda Bernal-Samano, a Rocketship parent leader committed to educational equity in her community, who has since gone on to become a board member on our national Board of Directors.
Using My Voice From Parent to Board Member
Rocketship Public Schools are community schools. Learn more about that means to us in this video!
What are Community Schools?
15 years ago, we launched the first Rocketship school in a church in downtown San Jose with makeshift classrooms and 160 courageous Rocketeers and their families. Since then, we have grown to serve over 25,000 students across 5 regions nationwide. Many of our founding Rocketeers are now graduating college and embarking on careers of service, innovation, and social justice. To help celebrate our 15 year anniversary, we sat down with three incredible alumni to hear their story and how Rocketship left an impact on their lives. We’re so proud that they’re not only their first in the family to graduate from university, but also determined to leave a positive impact in their communities. Learn more in this 4-minute video!
Rocketship Celebrates 15 Years: Alumni Stories