The Bay State Banner: Horizons Brings STEM Ed to Life for Children Experiencing Homelessness
Horizons for Homesless Children is an amazing organization that focuses on Boston youth that are homeless. They offer a place where their children have equal access to educational opportunities. We are thrilled to play a small part in these kids’ journeys.
The article reads in part:
“On a sunny Tuesday morning, light pours over the pre-kindergarten students clustered on a rug playing with wooden building blocks in their Roxbury day care classroom.
But they aren’t building a tower with the blocks they’re stacking. Instead, they’re writing a line of code, and the little robot on the rug in front of them knows what to do, moving and shaking and flashing with multicolored lights.
This lab space — dedicated to science, technology, engineering and mathematics programming — isn’t your normal lab, and the kids exploring coding through the building-block robots are the kinds of kids who often are the most likely to be left out of opportunities in these fields, known by the shorthand STEM.
The lesson with the KIBO robots — which took place simultaneously in English and Spanish — is part of a curriculum at Horizons for Homeless Children center in Roxbury, designed to better prepare children experiencing homelessness in low-income families for future education and beyond.
“This whole experience is about mitigating the impact of the trauma and making sure that when they leave here, they’re going off to school ready, socially and emotionally regulated, and rockin’ and rollin’ and ready to learn,” said Kate Barrand, CEO of Horizons.
The task is not a small one. Data has found that, in Massachusetts, one out of 19 families with kids under 6 experience homelessness, and Barrand said that, given the multi-year timeline to collect and process those numbers and recent struggles in the state to house new migrants, those numbers are probably higher.
But staff at Horizons are confident that their work with students 5 years old and younger who are living in shelter settings is having an impact.
“There’s a lack of resources that they have at this young age if they are of color and are in poverty,” said Shavon Drayton, director of early education training and assessment at Horizons. “Being able to offer them the exposure at a very kind of fundamental way is really what will provide them the opportunity to have a level playing field once entering kindergarten.”
Read the full article.
