As part of our ongoing priority to improve our work with schools, over the course of the year we will showcase success stories in Coming Together. This month we are featuring Gail Braten’s recent efforts to improve relations with educators in her area.
Gail Braten
Gail is an AFS Anchorage area Community Developer and Alaska Team Volunteer. She is the Team Chair as well as the Hosting Chair. Gail and her husband, Tim Jennings first became involved with AFS as host parents in 2005 and have hosted students almost every year since then. Gail attended the Outreach to Educators Conference in September and offered this missive.
“Of all the inspiring workshops at the AFS Outreach to Educators Conference in Kansas City, the educator panel made the biggest impression on me. It was one of those “oh my gosh, how could I have been so selfish – put the shoe on the other foot” moments when the panelists talked about what they need from AFS Volunteers. We are asking the schools to support us by taking our students and giving credit to them to study abroad and not asking in turn how we can support them. I happen to volunteer in a very supportive school district, but never once thanked or asked how we could support the district. The Anchorage School District has never turned down a student during my time volunteering with AFS and has a clear system in place to give returning students credit for their study abroad as well as an on-line school called MyHigh that helps them take critical classes from anywhere in the world that has internet access.
When I returned to Anchorage, Alaska, I went to see Derek Hagler at the school district offices and asked him how AFS could support the school district. Derek is the person who signs all the placement acceptance forms for AFS students entering the district. Derek suggested that I testify at a school board meeting. I signed up for the next meeting which coincided with the beginning of International Education Week and took a thank you note signed by all of the currently hosted students. They each wrote their names and “Thank you” in their various native languages. Then, I glued a picture of all the students and their host families on the front of the card. My allotted 3 minutes went very quickly and was well received. I have subsequently been invited to give presentations about AFS to department chairs for World History teachers and been invited to set up a table for AFS at school open houses, freshman orientations, and school registration. The Outreach to Educators Conference inspired me to start taking an already good relationship with the Anchorage School District to an even higher level as we aspire to move toward a more just and peaceful world one student, family, and school at a time.”
On October 21-23, 2011, approximately 140 AFS volunteers, educators, and staff joined together in Kansas City for the Outreach to Education conference. The main goal of the conference was to help volunteers strategize as to how they can better position their local presence with schools in a more strategic way to better align AFS program offerings to schools’ needs, prepare AFS for growth and deliver our hosting and sending programs more effectively.
All information regarding school outreach including tools, resources, trainings, and best practices can be found on the Wiki in the Schools Relations section here.
