I’m a College Counselor at the Soulsville Charter School in Memphis, TN.  We are in a neighborhood devastated by systemic poverty.  Our music focus comes from our association with the old Stax recording studio, now a world-famous museum of American Soul music.  We operate based on the principle that all students, regardless of race or socio-economic situation, deserve equal access to a four-year college education.  We currently serve 70 to 90 Seniors per year, and have achieved a 100% college acceptance rate for each of our three graduating classes thus far.  We are on track to accomplish 100% acceptance for the class of 2016 as well.  There is much to tell about our wonderful school and its rich history, but I’ll spare you more details and share the link to our website:  http://www.soulsvillecharterschool.org.  

Currently, we do not have the funding to provide a private computer for each student.  For Seniors, this poses a problem when it comes to writing papers, completing college applications, managing documents and calendars, etc.  Since these skills and access points are vital for college success, we would like to provide an opportunity for Seniors to match donors to purchase small, personal Chromebook computers.  Chromebooks provide all the functionality they could need, as we have trained them to use Google docs for most projects and assignments.  We feel it is important for Seniors to make a financial investment themselves so they have ownership over the device, but the full cost would be prohibitive for almost 100% of our Seniors.  

There are several dependable Chromebook devices that are available for as low as $200.00, so our goal is to raise at least $100.00 per Senior towards a personal device that they can use for the remainder of their Senior year, and then take with them to college.  We have raised enough to buy 13 Chromebooks so far...thanks to generous donors!  For this campaign, I hope to raise enough to buy 10 more.  That would mean that 23 of our 80 Seniors would have a Chromebook.  

A personal device would be life-changing for our students in terms of access, time and resource management skills, and organization.  I sincerely appreciate your willingness to consider our Chromebook matching project.  If you have any questions, thoughts, suggestions, or anything else, feel free to email me at rhenderson@tscsmemphis.org.

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