Student U

Students join Student U as rising sixth graders and continue participation through high school. The design creates a unique year-round, multi-year development model that sustains academic and personal growth and emphasizes long-term, personal relationships and community. In ensuring Student U achieves its desired outcomes for students, Student U provides quality teacher training and support; delivers a robust summer program; and sustains and enhances the summer experience throughout the academic year. As an academic enrichment program in Durham, Student U works with community partners to ensure that our students realize their fullest academic and personal potentials. We do this by bringing together Durham Public School students while employing passionate, dedicated, talented college students to teach, providing those college students with support from experienced DPS, Durham Academy, and Teach for America teachers, and by challenging everyone to dream and achieve more than he or she could have imagined. Student U students are students from Durham Public Schools. They are recruited as 5th graders, and make a commitment to remain with the program at least through high school. Student U students have endless potential, a desire to learn, and are capable of amazing achievement. Student U is a year-round program. The first part of the program is the summer intensive: a six-week program based at Durham Academy. The second part of the program is the school-year program, which includes: mentoring, study halls, leadership development, remedial math, remedial reading, Odyssey of the Mind, a science club, and literary clubs. We ask the teachers who we hire for the summer to commit to 2-3 hours a week for the school year to facilitate the school-year programming.