Weekly Media Roundup: August 12, 2015

New Nonprofit 4thQTR Mentors Middle School Students Through Football (Baltimore Sun, Maryland)

A pair of 20-something fitness buffs are helping young boys and girls avoid trouble and bad habits by teaching sports and mentoring them through the pivotal moments of their youth. Mark Covington and Justin Guy’s nonprofit 4thQTR Inc. uses sports as a vehicle to impart life lessons like leadership, teamwork and dedication. In the weekly afterschool program, kids exercise and run football drills while also receiving brotherly advice and homework help. The program focuses on four main areas: academic excellence, drug and alcohol awareness, healthy habits and leadership skills. But the founders see mentorship as the core of the program. “We think that if the support is coming from young mentors who really believe in you, that no matter what you want to be, a plumber or a football player or whatever, you’ll want to be the best you can be,” Covington told the Baltimore Sun.

Orchestra Opens Doors for Aspiring Musicians (Beloit Daily News, Wisconsin)

The Turtle Creek Chamber Orchestra is using music to stem summer learning loss for Beloit students. The orchestra hosts a four-day Summer Music Mini-camp to promote music education and teach life lessons to around 50 students this summer. “We teach teamwork how to work well together,” treasurer and orchestra co-founder Carol Roy told the Beloit Daily News. “(These) things that aren’t an exact science.” The camp provides scholarships so that students of diverse backgrounds and demographics can participate. Roy and the other co-founders hope to expand the program and eventually foster an international music exchange program.

Tower Street Community Center Program Fights Learning Loss (Westerly Sun, Rhode Island)

Students in the summer learning program at Tower Street School have been building, gardening, acting, solving math problems and reading all day throughout the summer to keep up their academic skills before school starts this fall. On a recent day, all their activities were water-focused – several students developed a water table while another built a boat out of a soda bottle, cardboard and bubble wrap. In teacher Marie Hoffmann’s math class, she shows her students how youngsters around the country are using math to make a difference in their communities. “I want our students to make connections, feel empowered and know that they can do it, too,” she told the Westerly Sun. “So we take math equations and put them into a bigger context.”

Teen’s Army of Tutors Helps Mold Baltimore’s Neediest Pupils (Washington Post)

The nonprofit U.S. Dream Academy’s Baltimore chapter was struggling to engage the area’s impoverished students – until 18-year-old Zach Azrael stepped in. Azrael recruited a group of teen volunteers eager to tutor underserved children in exchange for service learning hours, and now the afterschool Tutoring Outreach Program (TOP) is blossoming with 11 themed clubs and activities. The volunteers collaborate with younger students on robotics, art, athletics, music, technology, world culture, food and film, while also helping with the kids’ math and reading homework. It’s making a world of difference for the youths, who had often struggled in school. “Sometimes, kids don’t believe in themselves because they’re getting bad grades,” 15-year-old Isaiah House, Azrael’s tutee, told the Washington Post. “But when something difficult is broken down to the smallest possible level in a way they understand, they start to get it.”