NEW: Rhode Island School Choice Essay Contest Winners Announced
Thursday, August 01, 2013
Tiffany Rezendes and Bryan Morillo were selected as the winners of an essay contest on school choice held by the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity.
The winners of the contest were unveiled in conjunction with Friedman Legacy Day 2013, an annual celebration of the life and work of Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist and one of the early pioneers of school choice in America.
Essayists were asked to write about how school choice has, or may have, made a difference in their lives or in someone they know. Both winners attended Providence district schools and each will receive an iPad donated by a Board member of the Center. The two winning essays can be read from the Center's website at RIFreedom.org.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST"A major assertion of Milton Friedman was echoed as a common theme in the personal essays we received; namely, that poor families are most affected by a lack of school choice," said Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the Center. "He believed that residents of low-income neighborhoods, more than any other population, are disadvantaged when it comes to the quality of schooling they can get for their children."
Hitting close to home
Rezendes, 20, wrote about how one of her closest friends dropped out of high school due to a lack of a challenging curriculum in her Providence school with no option to choose a school that was better suited to her interests, and how "she just gave up once she found out she wasn't accepted into Classical because all her hopes of having a great education had to be lowered to settle for a below-average school experience."
Morillo, 17, discussed how lack of choice in schools "condemned the students of Providence (sic) to an attitude of 'sit at home and collect a check'... " because of a curriculum that left many "unprepared for the real world", and "making it easy to simply go through the motions.”
People United for Change is a youth-run organization based at Wiggins Village in Providence, focused on empowering people to bring about positive and meaningful change, through unity, to the city of Providence and the state of Rhode Island.
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