Building a Strong Foundation for Excellence
Welcome to the John F. Kennedy High School Educational Foundation, an innovative community action organization with a big idea. The idea is to close the academic “achievement gap” that separates African-American and Hispanic students on the one hand, from their White and Asian counterparts on the other. The time is now and the place is John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland -- a school with the perfect blend of school system, teachers, administrators, programs and students, to literally close the gap. Our student body is over 70 percent African-American and Hispanic, 62 percent of our students have been eligible for free lunch, so we know and live the gap – and know the path to closing it.
The problem is emphatically not inferior students. Ours is a school community with a high academic load, but it also overflows with outstanding academic achievers from more than 80 countries. The problem is resources. The achievement gap is a legacy gap -- the legacy of a history of diminished educational resources. Closing the gap requires extra resources, intelligently applied in ways that make a real difference in the lives of kids.
The Foundation attacks the gap through its Legacy Grant Program, a unique program for targeting resources where and how they are most needed. The Legacy Grant Program looks backward and forward. It seeks to close the legacy gap of the past, and simultaneously allow Kennedy’s current stakeholders and alumni to lay claim to a unique legacy to be shared with all future graduates of JFK.
In its first year, our Foundation is off to an outstanding start, having created alumni and business networks, and drawn financial support from Winchester Homes, Inc., the Weyerhauser Company Foundation, QualComm, Inc., and the prestigious Commonweal Foundation. We have also distributed over $25,000 in targeted Legacy Grants.