Thea is the Jumpstart Program Manager at the University of Southern California. She recruits, trains and manages college students, called Corps Members, to work with preschool children in low-income neighborhoods. Corps Members implement curriculum to ensure children entering Kindergarten are prepared to succeed. USC’s Jumpstart program is part of a larger nationwide organization. Check out Thea’s story to see how to combine early childhood education with nonprofit work!
Transcript
>> My name is Thea Quigley and I am the Jumpstart Program Manager here at USC so I recruit, train and mentor 40 college students every year who go into pre-school classrooms in low-income communities around USC and they work with the children for an academic year. So they implement in teams a research-based curriculum in the classroom and so the idea is that we want to make sure the children enter kindergarten prepared to succeed because a lot of times the children if they enter school behind they'll stay behind. So our job is to make sure that that doesn't happen and then they're set for success. My typical day really varies depending on the time of year. During the beginning of the school year because we do work on an academic calendar, at the beginning of this school year there's kind of a lot of interviewing students, letting students know about the program, working with the pre-schools and our community partners to kind of set up those relationships with them since we do work in pre-school classrooms as well as kind of working with some of our funders and especially our government funders at the beginning because we are, our students are AmeriCorps members meaning that they do as well as get work-study experience they get an education award, a small scholarship at the end. So it's really kind of forming those partnerships both with the students and with the communities that we work with at the beginning of the year. And then as the year progresses I focus a lot on quality implementation. We really want to make sure that the work that we're doing in the classroom is at the highest level possible because that's the only way that we'll see the gains in the children that we really are looking for. So it's a lot of coaching the students, really working with them, talking to the teachers, seeing kind of if they have any ideas and also making sure that we're really maintaining the integrity of our curriculum and then as the year starts to wind down it's just kind of wrapping all the program up. So saying goodbye to the our children, goodbye to our parents because we do also have parent engagement programs and then kind of working to set ourselves up for the next year. So it depends on the time of year but there's always something new and exciting.
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