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We believe there exists an enormous potential to improve the lives not only of the students of Coile, but of the entire community. Coile Center for Sustainability and Humanity will help young people make the complex connections between economic prosperity, lifestyle choices, environmental health and their own well-being. We base our curriculum on the 4es:
Environment
Equity
Entrepreneurship (economic prosperity, social entrepreneurism)
(Academic) English
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Our desire to turn W.R. Coile into a Center for Sustainability (including entrepreneurship) and Humanity stems from many years of working in our community and paying attention to the needs and desires of the families we serve.
In addition to serving students, we would like a family literacy center (for GED and ESL classes), and to continue to enlarge our gardens to capacity.
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Middle school students range in age from 11 to 15 and are in great need of supervised, enrichment opportunities during the afternoon hours following school. City centers naturally take care of this social issue; urban students benefit from cultural attractions in city centers such as libraries, museums, boys and girls clubs, and the like. While our students dress like their urban counterparts and many live in high-density areas, they lack access to cultural amenities available to those living in cities because our neighborhoods are situated in the rural perimeter of Clarke County, isolated from downtown Athens. Most live in trailer parks or duplexes that are located miles from a public bus stop and are separated from food sources, medical and other services. These insular living arrangements, coupled with high poverty rates (near one hundred percent free and reduced lunch rate), exacerbate the need for quality after school options for our students.
Studies show that providing access to quality after-school programs can shrink the resource/ opportunity/ achievement gap.
Coile Serves and other members of our community have come up with a plan: we would like to create a Center for Sustainability and Humanity.
This is part of our larger plan to change the narrative from "school as institution” into “school as community center” and as a resource for all ages.
We feel that this is an especially important time to make the push for turning our school into a resource for sustainability since our school district and Superintendent, Dr. Phil Lanoue, applied for the Charter System Model from Georgia DOE. Through this reform option, a large part of the school governance would shift to our school and surrounding neighborhoods. Through our research we identified a strong desire for entrepreneurship in the families we serve. Furthermore, there is a connection to the land that runs deep in our families. These agrarian families, both recent immigrants from Mexico and Central America and African-American families with rural roots, have much to teach us about sustainability.
Please click on the sub-pages to learn what we are doing to arrive at our goal.
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