LET ME SEE THE CHILDREN!! WHAT’S THAT YOU SAY??

Enter Week 2: Children are on a roll!!

So your fabulous coordinators have been hard at work and are off to a great start getting all their work done. We’ve learned some pretty interesting and hard hitting facts about children, especially in the city of Boston, in the past week.

For instance, over the past two decades, Boston public schools have made huge strides in improving the education system. More schools have been built and districts are putting in energy to improve childhood education. Since the incorporation of the state exam, Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), schools have been pushing for excellence and high standards. This test assesses knowledge in English, Math, Science, and History. Boston Public Schools have slowly been improving as more students are scoring in the “Proficient” range, but there is still a large amount of the Boston student population that scores in the “Needs Improvement” range.

Outside of academics, Boston has been building community centers and improving after school programs to keep children off the street. Roxbury has gone through dramatic changes in just the past ten years. Crime has gone down and more nursery and community centers have opened for low-income families. Your two coordinators have many sites planned to go into Roxbury and work with the kids, which will be a great opportunity to for others to see the growth in the city.

Another serious issue that we have been looking into is child abuse in the Massachusetts state area. Child abuse is severely under reported since many of the children are too young to come forward. Last year, Boston Medical Center had 454 suspected cases of child abuse or neglect. Also, in this year alone, there was a 34% increase in reported cases. The problem with reporting child abuse in Massachusetts is that the hospitals receive little to no funding for child abuse and neglect programs. The hospitals could be doing so much more given that they received money for the services that could potentially save many lives.

While we’ve been doing a lot of research on our issue area, we still have a ways to go. This information may be hard to cope with sometimes, but the great thing is that education of these issues can lead to great service of these issues. We hope to make this FYSOP a great a contribution to the children’s issues of Boston!

Hard at work

We love children <3

Hello everyone!

So now that training is over, we are finally delving into our fabulous issue area, CHILDREN! We are officially on the road to the most super FYSOP ever! I mean, this program is celebrating quite the milestone with its 20th birthday coming up! The first week was very exciting, as we basically started a bit of everything.

First off, we have been calling many sites, and just last Wednesday, we visited HeadStart in Jamaica Plain. Everyone was so nice and so excited to have our volunteers come in August. And not only did we have a great site visit, but we met a wonderful family on the T-ride back. They were on their way to orientation, and we showed them where to go. We got to meet back up with those parents at the orientation parents’ reception Thursday night, which was a BLAST! Promoting FYSOP is a grand old time!

Back to our lovely office work, we have four other site visits lined up for the next few weeks, including both old AND new sites! We are also currently working on our Ed Day Packet, and we are really stoked about our theme for Children this year (which we will not disclose at this time!). Our staff has been great about responding to our questions for the EDP, but the hard part is the research.

There is just so much to learn about Children, since essentially every issue area effects ours in some way. So we’re just working on trying to learn everything we can right now, and deciding what direction we really want to take our issue this year and what we really want to focus on. One specific issue we have been looking into lately is child poverty. In the world, one billion children live in poverty. Furthermore, 12 Million of those children live in America and 178,000 of those live in Massachusetts. It is such a big problem, and one that even hits us right here in Boston. So we will definitely be looking into sites to incorporate that issue if we can.

One of the more difficult tasks we have right now is trying to find good speakers for Ed Day. We want our speaker to be informative and engaging, so we have to keep working on that. So while we keep up the hard work, you do your part and have a great summer!

FYSOP Love,
Katie & Eddie

Kids these days…

Heyyyy Guys!!

David and Colleen here. We are the Children coordinators and we couldn’t be more excited for this year’s FYSOP! We are hard at work writing our Education Day packet, booking sites, visiting sites and learning about the wonderful world of children!

Being a kid is all fun and games, right? Well, that’s the way it should be, but unfortunately children today are scarred by abuse, neglect and violence. Some children struggle through our education systems, while others experience health issues and family problems. But, here’s the good news! You can help!!

We have already booked some amazing sites for the week including Headstart Jamaica Plain, Welcome Baby, Waltham Day Camp and Salvation Army-Cambridge…just to name a few! With FYSOP 19 Children, you will be playing with kids, tutoring, preparing classrooms for kids, organizing baskets for new mothers and stuffed animals for abused children!!

Check back for more info throughout the summer! If you have any questions, comments or just a good joke, feel free to contact us at fysopchildren08@gmail.com!!

While we try to teach our children all about life,
Our children teach us what life is all about.
~Angela Schwindt