![]() ![]() “The back of the masks are the things we actually have in common - and that’s what brings us together.” “The front of the masks were the things in common that people expect us to be,” Nathan Ferhart, 13, an eighth-grader, said after the exercise. Then students listed three qualities on the front - such as happy, smart or funny - and qualities such as anger or stressed on the back. This piece originally aired on Monday, February 4, 2013.Īshanti Branch is now a teacher at Montera Middle School in Oakland, and has started another Ever Forward chapter there.Students were asked to sketch the front of a typical mask that they let people see, and a back of the mask showing what they don’t usually show others. Lizzy Schultz is a student reporter at Mills College in Oakland. Over 3,500 high school students participate in these types of programs every year thanks to funding from The After School Education and Safety Program fund, the 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, and the City of Oakland. The students involved with the program have a 100 percent graduation rate from high school and 100 percent are being accepted into college.īut the problem for the Club is how it can continue to thrive. The group does not receive funding from the school because of its nonprofit status. His life story has been a way to connect with the students.Ī teacher by day and a mentor during all other hours, the executive director says it has been a struggle to find funding for the Ever Forward Club. Nine years later, Ever Forward has two locations with over 55 members and a few teachers who help coordinate the trips and meetings.īranch grew up without a father from a single mother on welfare. That’s how the Ever Forward Club began, says Branch. Let’s talk about the good, the bad, the ugly, let’s talk about more positive than negative but let’s talk about what it is that is in the way that is not letting you live the way you want to live.” You come to this class and I’ll buy you lunch once a week, every Thursday, and let’s just talk. When eight of them showed up, Branch told them: “I’m gonna buy you lunch once a week. Branch felt he wasn’t reaching out to them, so decided to invite some young men together. “I was teaching mathematics and what I really thought students need was a teacher who cared, a teacher who was prepared, a teacher who had passion and I was all those things but I still had these African-American and Latino boys that were not passing,” says Branch.īranch began researching and found that 47 percent of African-American males and 43 percent of Latino males were failing half or more of their classes. After finishing his Masters at Mills College, he began teaching at San Lorenzo High School. That can-do attitude is the idea behind the club – always moving forward, always improving who you can be.īranch got this idea around ten years ago when his job as a civil engineer was not feeding his soul. Now a senior in high school, Bernall says Ever Forward founder Ashanti Branch, as well as the other mentors, have helped to shift his thinking around areas like going to college. I always used him as an excuse, not having a father there to show me what’s right and what’s wrong,” says Bernall. I was out with friends and never did my homework and I used to blame it on the absence of my father, because he was never in my life there for me, or my sister. “I got held back in ninth grade because I was coping with my life in negative ways. Before he joined, his personal and academic lives were in a downward spiral. The Ever Forward Club is one non-profit organization that is helping provide after school support.īernall has been involved with the group for four years and is now its president. ![]() The Oakland Unified School District provides government-funded after-school programs to thirteen high schools around the Oakland area. ![]() “The Ever Forward Club honestly saved my life, to sum it up,” says Oakland high school student Omar Bernall. ![]()
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