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What The HBJ’s Best Place to Work Award Really Means to Us

July 07, 2011 by Jeremy Jones

yes prep teachers visit stonehenge YES Prep was awarded the 2011 Houston Business Journal’s Best Places to Work for the second consecutive year. We couldn’t be more honored to be associated with some of our city’s best organizations. We are proud, but continue to be convicted by our mission to transform Houston by preparing more low-income students for college graduation.

YES Prep is unique on this list of Houston’s Best Places to Work. We are the only public education provider on the list. This is our second consecutive award. Our product is human capital and our competitor is the academic achievement gap. We have a lot of fun, but we often eat our lunch on our feet if at all. Our work can be extremely intellectually, emotionally and physically exhausting. Every day, we come to work before the sun comes up and often times leave when the sun is already down knowing that what we accomplished that day will have a million and one benefits for our students, our families, our communities both in the present and the future.

In a recent survey, we asked our team to use three words to describe YES Prep. By far, the most popular word was DEDICATION. The people that we recruit and select to work at Houston’s best public school are by far the most intelligent, driven and dedicated people I have ever known. We come from diverse backgrounds: some of us are teachers by training, some called to the work because of the social justice aspect, some are very young and some have experienced a lot of life. The one thing that unites us is our collective dedication to ensure that every student in every classroom across our ten campuses will have the opportunity to create their own life path.

yes prep teachers visit the alamo The odds are stacked against us. Students in Houston, and in urban and rural low-income neighborhoods across the country are dropping out of high school at alarming rates. Our education system is not structured in a way that meets the needs of our students; we are challenged to attract our nation’s top talent into the classroom and our political leaders have made difficult financial decisions that will certainly impact education. Despite all of these factors, our teachers, our school leaders and everyone at YES Prep comes to work each day just as dedicated to our mission as we were the day before. We know this level of dedication is required to overcome the extraneous external factors holding back out students. It’s the dedication that compels us to visit students at home and have our cell phones handy if they need to call. You will see the dedication to our students in the classrooms when you see students invested in their work because they know how hard their teachers are working. You can see the dedication in each interaction and in every decision.

Ultimately, being among Houston’s Best Places to Work is third party validation of what we already know about what makes a place of work truly great: being dedicated and surrounded by equally dedicated people with deep conviction in a mission that matters. This reveals something about the human character that we seek in the future teachers and school leaders that we recruit and what we attempt to cultivate in our students: that we, as humans, actually enjoy being pushed beyond our perceived limitations in order to achieve a nearly insurmountable goal. It’s the dedication to ensuring that we do not lose another student to the achievement gap that unites us and that we hope to celebrate with this award from the Houston Business Journal.

For more blogs about Y Houston will be the first large city in the country to close the achievement gap, please read our Y Houston blog. Remember to follow us on Twitter, become a Fan on Facebook and watch our videos on YouTube. To help us increase the number of low-income students that finish a four-year college, apply online.

yes prep director of recruitment and teach for america alum jeremy jones Jeremy Jones is the Senior Director of Recruitment and Selection for the YES Prep Public School where he ensures that every student has a great teacher and school leader. Jones is a 2005 Teach For America Alum and a graduate of Texas A&M University.