The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

YES Prep Southeast Students Rock Band for Haiti Fundraiser

January 24, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

My mission as a World Geography teacher is to make our students citizens of the world. After seeing their reaction to the catastrophe in Haiti, I couldn’t be more proud. They care. They want to do something about the injustice that they are seeing. They are an amazing group of kids, and I am a better citizen of the world because of them. For instance, one of my students, 9^th Grader Jessica Pungo, quipped, “We are all part of the world.  Why not help our neighbors?  Make the world a better place.”

We were horrified when we saw the news from Haiti: buildings collapsing, people’s lives destroyed, chaos everywhere.  I often tell my students: If you don’t like something, you need to work to change it.  Mahatma Gandhi reminds me daily in his world-famous quotation on my classroom wall,

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YES Prep Students Cheer Houston Marathoners

January 22, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

“We are a family-oriented school,” is a saying that can be found hanging in the hallways (or, in some cases, outdoor walkways) of every YES Prep campus. It is one of the tenets of our organization, drafted and approved by some of the earliest young dreamers to find an excellent education and a chance at a different life. It is a code that we live by.

But after teaching for a couple of years for this dynamic organization, sometimes I feel like the saying should read a little differently. Omit a few choice words, and it reads, “We are family.”

And this is what we truly are.

The best example of this, I think, is the way in which we support each other. And not just through hard times that happen to befall us, but through hard times that we might go out of our way to seek out. What am

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Can Inner City Prep School Succeed? Answer is YES

January 03, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

Please take time to read the AP article on YES Prep's Senior Class and the College Counseling program in the Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Washington Post, ABC News, and many other news outlets. Tell us what you think!

By MONICA RHOR Associated Press

HOUSTON — It was Deadline Day at YES Prep North Central, the day college applications were supposed to be finished, the day essays, personal statements and a seemingly endless series of forms needed to be slipped into white envelopes, ready for submission.

The day the school's first graduating class would take one leap closer to college.

The seniors inside Room A121 were sprinting, scurrying and stumbling to the finish line. They hunched over plastic banquet tables, brows furrowed and eyed fixed on the screens of Dell laptop

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Winter Break brings teachers a much needed break

December 29, 2009 by Jeremy Jones

I was sitting on my couch in my living room in Orlando, FL, fire crackling and Christmas tree aglow… reading.  It was during this beautiful moment in which I realized that for the first time in a long time I was reading a book that I wasn’t going to teach.  I was forced to reflect on the beauty of winter break.

A typical YES teacher is in many more places than just his or her classroom.  He or she might be in the lunchroom every day for lunch duty, in parent meetings after school in a school director’s office, holding early-morning tutorials in the library, visiting the home of a newly accepted 6^th grade student, or even out of town promoting YES Prep at a career fair or university. On our East End campus, teachers are often seen running across the street in the rain, monitoring our

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YES Prep Sports Profile: Cross Country

November 23, 2009 by James Sheridan

Cross Country is life.  How sweet it is!

Since my first day at YES Prep’s Southeast campus, the date 11.14.09 was posted everywhere: in the Cross Country locker room, on the outside of my office door and especially in the minds of my senior runners. They knew that this year was their last chance to make it to State.  We started out in the darkness in August, running at 5:30 a.m., doing the slow slogs to Crenshaw Park in Pasadena through the back roads from the Southeast campus. Our small, but intense crew of runners worked their way up the hill at Crenshaw Park. They dreamed of a day in November when all their hard work would finally pay off.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t qualify every runner for State.  However, we sent two of our finest runners—the fastest runners in YES history—to

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