• What will you or your group call your project?
  
• What will be you or your group's goals and objectives?
  
• What Essential Question will you or your group investigate?
  
• What will you or your group actually be doing during Senior Options
  THIS WILL PROVIDE THE DETAILED BULK OF YOUR ANSWER.
  
• How will these activities help to fulfill your goals and objectives as well as answer your essential question?
  
• In what ways will your Sponsor interact with, work with, and assist you or your group during Senior Options?

If you are in a group:
WRITE AND SUBMIT ONE PROPOSAL FOR THE ENTIRE GROUP.

Evaluating Educational Differences

My goals are to create an organized student forum where students from privileged schools and students from underprivileged schools can discuss the differences in their respective educations. Although this will take some time to organize, I am hoping to hold the forum in one afternoon.

Among the essential questions to be addressed are: How does money effect education? How does quality of school effect attitudes toward education? Do students with money deserve a leg up?

I will divide my senior options experience into two parts: the first will be working with a London documentary company to produce a documentary about the education experiences in America and the second will be to work with AQE to help in organizing upcoming events and to produce a filmed student forum that discusses the differences in education between Scarsdale and inner-city schools.

Internship hours (working with AQE):
15 hours per week

Independent hours (produce a documentary):
10 hours per week

TOTAL HOURS PER WEEK: 25 (including subtracted time because of the commute to and from Brooklyn)

For my more independent work I will work with Lucy Bell, who works for a London TV documentary production company. She is reviewing the discrepancies in American Education and is filming a documentary to help train teachers London teachers. My sponsor, April Humphrey, connected me to the company. Hopefully, I will be able to use footage from this documentary to present in my June presentation. I will need to get approval from Mr. Klemme to create the documentary and to create waiver forms and letters to be sent out to the participants. The waiver form has already been created but I will need to write a letter detailing a brief synopsis of what exactly the documentary is all about. The letter would include a brief description of the production company (they’re from London and they create educational resources for teachers to learn from), the overall theme of the documentary (a British man comes to America to explore the education system and the different types of educational opportunities that are available in the United States), and how the documentary would be used (to teach teachers in England about the American education system).

Even though I am enrolled in 3 AP’s, I will use the week of May 5th to film the documentary in school and at home. I will hopefully be able to use my classes and the school to capture footage of what the Scarsdale experience is really like. I will not be doing the actual filming. The production company will be filming me, my family, the campus, and maybe one or two of my classes, preferably my chemistry class to show the differences between a Scarsdale education and the education in inner city schools. On May 6th, my family and I will be filmed discussing our educational experiences. On the 7th and 8th, the school will be filmed. If the use of the school and my classes is not approved I will be working with the production company to film other schools in New York City or possibly Rye High School. However, the production will still film the discussion with me and my parents to discuss our educational experiences
.
For the majority of my 6 weeks, I will be interning at and traveling to the AQE office in Brooklyn where I will meet with my sponsor, April Humphrey, the regional director of the Alliance for Quality Education, who will help me network with schools across the city and in Westchester and also help me set up the forum in the High School. She will increase my contacts so I can work with this issue in the future.

Also at AQE, I will be organizing town hall meetings and rallies to be held in the upcoming months. This involves making phone calls to participants who have been active in the past, reaching out to schools and underprivileged neighborhoods, and finding new potential contacts through other sister organizations such as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. Hopefully I will be able to speak at a town hall meeting in New York City, most likely in Brooklyn or Harlem to discuss my experiences and unique outlook toward the education crisis. I will be traveling to Brooklyn several days during the week so commuting time would be deducted from my overall hours per week. However, I will try to work out bringing work home that I do not need to do in the AQE office that way I have more time to work and will not have to commit so much time to traveling.

The filming of the forum can be helpful to the organization in the future to use in AQE lobbyist efforts. The forum can be used as an effective tool to increase awareness within underprivileged communities. I will learn the amount of work and effort it takes to organize an event such as this. The forum will be useful to AQE because they can use it to help in their lobbyist efforts to show the differences in educational experiences and how inner-city schools can be improved.

I am hoping to get approximately 15 students total from Scarsdale and from one or two inner city schools to discuss the differences in their respective educations. I need to create a list of questions to be discussed and find active participants who are interested in the topic. One question could ask how classes are run: lectures, discussion, visuals, hands-on, etc. Another could ask how students spend their time outside of school (how much time they spent on homework, sports, extracurricular activities, jobs, etc.).

I will set up the forum, to be held in Scarsdale High School, hopefully the round table in the board of education office, room 170-172, so I will have to seek permission from Stacy Rodriguez. I will need to talk to the AV office or Ms. Bierbauer to get permission to use school cameras during the forum to film and hopefully people in the AV club will do the filming. After getting permission from MR. Leong for using his editing equipment, I will edit the forum and am hoping to show it on Cable 77. I will need to talk to Dave Berry about how to put it on TV.

When all is said and done I will present my findings with clips from both the forum and the documentary at my own June presentation.