Auburn U Adopts All Second Graders @ Chicago’s Schmid School

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johnkarls
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Auburn U Adopts All Second Graders @ Chicago’s Schmid School

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This heart-warming story was featured during ESPN’s College Game Day yesterday (10/31/2015) which comprises a 3-hour panel discussion every Saturday morning by four experts (Rece Davis, Lee Corso, Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howard) of all of the day’s college football games before the first wave of games kicks off at High Noon EST.

Schmid Elementary School is a Title I school on Chicago’s notorious South Side. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provides federal aid to inner-city schools. More than 90% of Schmid students are at or below the poverty line.

Special kudos to Quinlan Matthew, Schmid’s second-grade teacher!!!

Last spring, she had her class break into four groups, each of which selected a university on which the group made a presentation after considerable research.

One of the groups studied Auburn University, presumably at the suggestion of Quinlan Matthew who had married into an Auburn U family.

Quinlan reported that she was blown away by the enthusiasm and thoroughness with which that group tackled its project.

This caught the eye of Auburn U Athletic Director Jay Jacobs.

He and Quinlan Matthew organized a special assembly during the summer for all of Schmid’s second graders.

Representing Auburn were not only Jay Jacobs, but also the Auburn mascot Aubie The Tiger in costume and in character, and Auburn’s Bo Jackson who won the Heisman Trophy in 1985 as the nation’s most outstanding college football player.

[Bo Jackson is the only collegiate ever to be named an All Star in two major sports, he was the first pick in the first round of the 1986 NFL draft, he played in the 1990 Pro Bowl, and he also played simultaneously Major League Baseball in whose 1989 All-Star Game he was selected as the Most Valuable Player.]

At last summer’s Special Assembly, all of the second graders were invited to spend a weekend at Auburn University where they participated in Tiger Walk and were introduced on the football field on which they watched Auburn win.

[The $40 thousand cost of their weekend at Auburn was picked up by anonymous donors and alumni.]

Auburn alumni are now raising funds to pay for all of those Schmid students to attend Auburn U when they graduate from high school.

BRAVISSIMA, QUINLAN MATTHEW!!! AND BRAVISSIMI, JAY JACOBS, AUBIE THE TIGER, BO JACKSON, AND ALL OF THE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE AUBURN UNIVERSITY FAMILY WHO ARE MAKING THIS POSSIBLE!!!


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Reading Liberally Editorial Comments

Quinlan Matthew and Jay Jacobs have named the new program for Schmid’s now-third-grade class as “Auburn Family In Love.”

Yours Truly would bet that AFIL will provide tutors and mentors for each of Schmid’s now-third-graders, and will raise sufficient funding to send all of them to Auburn U.

If so, this would inadvertently “re-invent the wheel” of Eugene Lang’s “I Have A Dream”® Program of the 1990’s of adopting an entire third-grade class of an inner-city school (or third-grade cohort of a public housing project) and enclosing it in a protective cocoon in which education is revered rather than disrespected, each child has a tutor and mentor (many of whom become Surrogate Parents), and college tuition is guaranteed.

Incidentally, Auburn Family In Love follows the pattern of an “I Have Dream”® Program in New Haven CT that was sponsored by The Hon. Chris Coons who currently serves as U.S. Senator from Delaware.

Chris served as the volunteer Corporate Secretary for the IHAD-National Board during the 1990’s when Yours Truly served as the volunteer IHAD-National Treasurer. Chris had been fortunate enough after graduating simultaneously from Yale Law School and Yale Divinity School in 1992 to join for several years the full-time staff of IHAD-National as a volunteer because his mother (Sarah Louise Coons Gore), the sponsor of IHAD-Delaware and wife of the inventor of Gore-Tex®, was delighted to underwrite his being a full-time volunteer for IHAD-National.

While serving as a full-time volunteer for IHAD-National, Chris invented the U.S. Government’s Americorps Program and virtually all of Americorp’s participants for quite a few years were tutors and mentors in the 178 IHAD Programs in 51 American cities.

Also while serving as a full-time volunteer for IHAD-National, Chris organized IHAD-New Haven with the support of Yale alumni. The Executive Director of IHAD-New Haven was the son of Joseph Lieberman, U.S. Senator for CT and Al Gore’s running mate in 2000.

BRAVISSIMO, CHRIS COONS!!! AND BRAVISSIMA, SARAH GORE!!!

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