Give the Gift of Competitiveness through Education: Essential2Life Education Culture Scholars Project

As you may have heard, I am working with Atlanta Tutors and Essential2Life Urban Youth Solutions to provide inner-city students with quality one-on-one SAT prep and foreign language tutoring. Select students--all of whom are juniors at Douglass High School in Atlanta--have been hand-picked to receive supplemental education so as to enhance their student profiles and competitiveness in the college application process.

The reality is that these students need one-on-one tutoring to score in a competitive range when they take the SAT next year. High quality tutoring is expensive, but often less expensive than SAT prep courses. Atlanta Tutors, a local tutoring service that is known for superior quality in teaching and raising scores, has been generous enough to offer their services at a discount for these select Douglass students. Today I am challenging each of my family members and friends to buy at least one hour of SAT or foreign language tutorials for these high school students. Tutorials with some of the most qualified, experienced, and effective tutors in Atlanta are $50/hour. The goal for each student is to have ten weeks of classes, two hours per week. That's $1000 for 20 hours, but compare that with $2599 for the same amount of time with Kaplan or $2400 with Princeton Review. If you are going to give this holiday season, please give to the effort to not only help close the achievement gap by producing competitive college applicants, but to also develop a class of nationally competitive juniors among Atlanta's own.

How you can help
You can help these students improve their chances of getting into college with the purchase of an hour or more of tutoring on the Atlanta Tutors website. Please put "Eseential2Life" in the student name field so that the credit will be applied to this project. You can also send a check to Atlanta Tutors - P.O. Box 450442 Atlanta, GA 31145-9998 - 678.412.5457. Per request of the donor, student progress reports will be provided to show how together, we can ensure that our students achieve.

Also, if you have any new or used SAT books or foreign language (Spanish or French) learning materials, please notify me at cultureofeducation@gmail.com


Essential2Life
The organization seeks to achieve its vision by continually and responsibly stewarding their mission "to create life-change for urban youth through mentoring and educational/career opportunity programs."
Essential2Life works directly with families in the public housing communities of Atlanta-a city that comprises a disproportionate 43% of the region's poor. Since its inception, E2L has created mentoring and educational opportunities for over 10,000 youth. It is E2L's goal to help at-risk youth "be more".
Through "15" a leadership program, students are offered a 3 year opportunity to be taught that leadership skills, so they can be a positive voice for their peers and pursue a life of purpose and distinction.


Stay tuned for this project's progress!