The Community is Our Best Resource: How ‘Grow Your Own’ could work for Philly

Young people all across the nation are looking for teachers that are qualified and will help draw them into success in education. However, in the city of Philadelphia, not all students have effective and qualified teachers in their schools. Grow Your Own (GYO) is a program that can and will help students get the qualified teachers they deserve in their neighborhood schools.

The Grow Your Own program is a teacher certification program that focuses on community members who want to become teachers. The program starts out recruiting people from inside schools, such as support staff, security guards, and cafeteria workers. Those recruited are then able to continue to work inside the school and get to go to college to become fully certified teachers.
 
This program would be such a good opportunity for community members and students. For the students, they’d be more familiar with the teacher that comes from their community, therefore it creates a more comfortable environment. Also the balance of respect between students and teachers would increase because they understand where one another comes from. Furthermore, because they are fully qualified and hold the ability to meet the needs of all their students, it will create a better learning atmosphere.
 
In the city of Philadelphia, students in neighborhood schools see teachers transferring in and out of their schools. This high rate of teacher turnover creates an unstable environment; students must constantly readjust to the new teachers each year or, in some cases, the middle of the year.  A Grow Your Own program can help eliminate the high teacher turnover rate because community members who become teachers will more than likely want to stay connected to their community school.  Grow Your Own invests in its teachers to have a career in teaching.  Teachers in this program commit to teaching in a school in their community for five years.
 
In Chicago, community groups organized a mass movement to bring Grow Your Own to their city because it created a pipeline to increase the number of Black and Latino teachers into the school district.  We know the School District of Philadelphia and Dr. Ackerman have made it a priority to bring in more Black and Latino teachers, so it looks like a perfect fit.
 
Philadelphia needs a program like Grow Your Own because it will push forward the movement for educational justice. The students in our underfunded neighborhood schools will get the effective teachers they deserve. The time has come to realize that our community is and will be the number one resource for our education. 
 
By Shania Morris. This article was originally published in Philadelphia Student Union's newsletter, The Union Rep. Download the full Spring 2010 Union Rep.

Mariah Porter, a PSU member from Overbrook HS, scribes during a meeting about PSU's teacher quality campaign.