>> 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.