Philanthropist
Eli Broad Awards California School District $500,000
by
Lucy Friedland
Shouts of jubilation erupted as billionaire philanthropist
Eli Broad announced the winner of his annual scholarship competition
in Los Angeles. The $500,000 award, presented to Garden Grove
Unified, a school district just south of Los Angeles, is the
top prize in a nationwide competition geared toward public
schools that have exhibited significant improvement in student
performance despite economic hardship, limited resources and
urban blight.
Garden Grove Superintendent
of Schools, Laura Schwalm, manifestly shaken from the adrenaline
rush of the award, told an audience of educators, including
President Bush’s
Secretary of Education Rod Paige, “We’ve asked
our teachers to make some tough changes over the past few years,
to get everyone aligned and focused on the same goals. This
really validates what we’re doing.” Schwalm went
on to thank Eli Broad and The Broad Foundation, and to assure
the Los Angeles-based philanthropist that the prize money will
provide scholarships for Garden Grove seniors who would otherwise
be unable to attend college.
The other districts in final competition
for the prize were Boston, Massachusetts, Charlotte, North
Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia and Houston, Texas. Each runner-up
district will receive $125,000 in scholarship funds. In order
to be eligible for the prize, The Broad Foundation mandates
the school district serve at least 3500 students between kindergarten
and twelfth grade, forty percent of whom must be poor enough
to qualify for free or discounted meals at school. In addition,
the school districts must be multi-ethnic; all of the five
2004 finalist districts are more than fifty percent “non-white.”
At
a luncheon following the award presentation, Broad addressed
the current problems facing American schools. “Public education
is a crisis we can no longer ignore,” proclaimed Broad,
who said there is an ever-widening gap between student achievement
and socio-economic level. “The world has changed,” Broad
said. “There are two types of workers in the twenty-first
century—service workers and highly-skilled ‘knowledge
workers.’ We must make sure our children receive enough
education to become ‘knowledge workers.’”
The luncheon also featured
a speech from U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who
thanked Eli Broad personally for “giving inspiration to urban leaders,” and
urged the audience of educators and school superintendents
to “kick [their] efforts up a notch” when returning
home. Paige said “the narrowing of the education gap
is the civil rights issue of our generation” and that
the philosophy of Broad’s foundation is consonant with
the president’s educational mission of “No Child
Left Behind.”
In addition to
Eli Broad and Secretary Paige, the audience was introduced
to an actual recipient of Broad’s
scholarship funds—a first-generation American girl
slated to begin UCLA this fall. The student, whose father,
a Vietnamese immigrant, is a janitor with little formal education,
told the audience she would not be able to attend college
were it not for the largesse of the Broad Foundation. At
UCLA, she plans to pursue a premedical course of study, eventually
becoming an OB/GYN physician.#
