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Teacher makes good on an impossible promise

Luke Skywalker

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No one thought Rachel Yanof would be able to pull it off, but 7 years later, every member of the graduating class at her charter school will be going to college.



Rachel Bennett Yanof receives a hug from graduate Amber Stewart, following the first graduation ceremony for Phoenix Collegiate Academy Tuesday, May 24, 2016, in Phoenix.(Photo: David Kadlubowski/The Republic)


PHOENIX - Seven years ago, Rachel Yanof walked door to door in a south Phoenix neighborhood,<span style="color: Red;">*</span>skirting broken bottles and barking dogs, wilting in triple-digit temperatures in search of students for her new charter school.
She and her staff staked out the nearby Ranch Market and a Walmart, sometimes offering to carry families’ bags and following them home.
Rachel returned to some houses four or five times. She perched on car hoods, front stoops and kitchen chairs and talked for as long as someone would listen.
She wanted neighborhood kids to sign up.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>The curriculum at Phoenix Collegiate Academy would be rigorous, she would say, the standards high. Students would wear uniforms. Homework would be mandatory. She would employ the best teachers.
And, she promised, every student would go to college. Every single one.
There was no reason to believe her.
Not in this area, where the students are mostly poor and Hispanic and where it was tough enough to graduate from high school, let alone make it to college.
Rachel was sure she could do better.
This month,<span style="color: Red;">*</span>five years after I wrote that first story about Phoenix Collegiate Academy, Rachel invited me back. The sixth-graders she recruited that first summer were seniors.
She wanted me there for Signing Day, the day when seniors would sign letters of intent for the colleges they would attend.
Counselor Andrea Glenn was giving the seniors some new numbers to consider — statistics of their own.
One hundred percent of 25 seniors had applied to college — 90 colleges, in all. They received 50 scholarships totaling $205,314 — “So far,” she added.
Ninety-two percent of the seniors would be the first person in their family to attend college.
And then one by one, the students crossed the stage, accompanied by their parents, younger siblings, a favorite teacher, or mentor, leaned into the microphone to say the name of the college they would attend and unfurled a banner with the school’s name on it.
For more on this story, click here.
AZCENTRAL
A Phoenix teacher made an impossible promise; 7 years later, she made good on it




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