FIVE KEYS LAUNCHES FIRST MOBILE SCHOOL IN THE NATION FOR ADULTS

City bus converted into state-of-the-art classroom will target at-risk youth and adults, many of whom can’t cross gang lines to get to school

San Francisco, Calif. – Five Keys Schools and Programs (Five Keys)—a nationally recognized social justice organization that serves at-risk individuals with academic, job training and recovery programs— today unveiled the first mobile school in the nation for adults who have fallen through the cracks of the public education system. The Five Keys Mobile School: The Self-Determination Project will go directly into some of San Francisco’s most neglected communities to increase residents’ immediate access to programs that will allow them to earn a high school diploma. The bus, donated by SF Muni, has been transformed into a state-of-the-art classroom with a significant contribution from Google.

“The zip code you’re born into shouldn’t determine your future, so we came up with the solution of taking education directly into the housing projects to eliminate the main barriers to receiving a high school diploma. We want to give those, many of whom have been let down by the system a second chance at an education,” Five Keys Executive Director Steve Good said. “Our proven programs and our community partnerships are coming together to bring education, as well as counseling and social services, to the people. We want to continue to break the cycle of violence and incarceration through this efficient and potentially scalable solution.”

Classes in the mobile school—which will be free of charge—will begin next month, and if successful, will expand to Oakland and Los Angeles. Five Keys’ vision is to impact some of the most neglected neighborhoods in this country by supporting those who want to replicate the mobile schools.

Five Keys has long operated campuses in tough neighborhoods to minimize the distance a student must travel to get an education. Currently, Five Keys serves 5,000 students each day—3,000 of them in the county jails and 2,000 in their 70 community learning centers in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. That targeted approach is making a real difference. While the state’s recidivism rate is 68 percent, only 28 percent of Five Keys students return to jail.

However, numerous campuses in different locations did not eliminate key barriers faced by individuals in certain communities: having to cross gang lines to get to a school or an inability to pay for public transportation to get there. This challenge forced the Five Keys team to redefine how education could be delivered.

“The mobile school targets those who are slipping through the cracks because they aren’t able to get to class due to fear or lack of access to transportation,” said Five Keys Co-Founder Sunny Schwartz. “It’s about bringing dignity, service and responsiveness to those who have been forgotten. Education is a key factor to people’s self-determination and livelihood. But, we also want to bring comprehensive services that will help those trapped in a cycle of crime and incarceration the opportunity to determine their own futures.”

The bus will follow a regular route and set schedule each week to high-need communities where most of Five Keys’ students come from: Bayview-Hunter’s Point, Potrero Hill, Sunnydale and the Tenderloin. In San Francisco alone, there are 86,000 people that have not completed their high school education. In the Bayview-Hunter's Point, for example, more than 8,000 of its 36,000 residents don’t have a high school diploma.

The school, which would be able to serve more than 60 students each week, will be open to everyone in the neighborhood over the age of 18. Registration will take place on-site. Students will have a regular teacher during their scheduled class time on the bus and will work toward graduation through independent study on other days. The teachers on the bus will be equipped to provide referrals for additional services, but in time, the mobile school itself will become a one-stop-shop with counselors and case managers onsite.

The $250,000 mobile learning center comes equipped with traditional classroom equipment including desks, chairs and a whiteboard—all of which have sliding components to allow for different configurations depending on the needs of the class—as well as a library and study area in the back. The bus has Wi-Fi, Chromebooks, a television and runs on a 10 kw-generator that will allow it to operate without having the engine running.

Hope SF, a partnership between the Office of the Mayor and The S.F. Housing Authority, is working with Five Keys to transform some of the city’s most distressed public housing sites into thriving mixed-income communities.

“Education is the cornerstone of personal change, and that’s why Five Keys is a critical partner in this work of revitalizing distressed communities,” said Theo Miller, director of Hope SF. “If we want to be successful in our work together and have collective impact, we must reimagine how we provide key services to those who need them. That’s what Five Keys has done with the mobile school, by bringing education directly into those neighborhoods and to the people, eliminating barriers to a high school diploma.”

Google contributed $100,000 to the mobile school through the Google Impact Challenge, which aimed to support strong, innovative, social-impact ideas with reach and scalability.

“Google is thrilled to contribute to the Five Keys Mobile School, because it’s programs like these that transform communities,” said Rebecca Prozan, Google’s Bay Area chief of public policy and government affairs. “This mobile school targets the problem with a real solution, benefitting reengaged students, families and entire communities. We’re proud to be part of this innovative and exciting project.” Architect Deanna Van Buren designed the bus, with funding support by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, bringing to life Five Keys’ vision of the mobile school.

About Five Keys Schools and Programs Founded in 2003 as the first charter high school in the nation to operate inside of a county jail, Five Keys has grown into a nationally recognized social justice organization that operates accredited charter schools and programs at the cross-section of education innovation and criminal justice. Each day, its schools and programs in 70 locations across California provide more than 5,000 at-risk adults and transitional-aged youth with crucial learning opportunities that restore communities, transform lives and break the cycle of re-incarceration. For at-risk individuals outside the system, Five Keys provides comprehensive case management incorporating academic, job training and recovery programs. In 2017 Five Keys launched its first mobile learning center, a city bus converted into a state-of-the-art classroom (that will be) stationed in some of San Francisco’s most neglected communities.

Contact: Alison Littman 760-803-9989 ali@larsonpr.com

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What happens when you put a classroom on wheels and park it in the poorest neighborhoods of San Francisco?

By Elizabeth Weil / Photographs by Eugene Riley and Chris Shurn

One day late last August, Shelia Hill sat at a table on a sidewalk in Sunnydale, outside a San Francisco city bus that had been painted an exceedingly upbeat shade of apple green, yelling at every car that rolled by.

“YOU GOT YOUR HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA?”

“Hey, how YOU doing? You got a minute?”

Shelia — who is 51 and has bright red hair and who is fond of sharp sweats, lacquered nails, and a pair of Adidas that say love — was sitting with Katie, the bus driver, trying to recruit students. Shelia was doing all the work.

“How’s your day going? Blessed?”

“Hey, YOU got a diploma? You want an application?”

Sunnydale —  the name of a housing project but really the name of a neighborhood — is one of the poorest, most forgotten parts of San Francisco. If Shelia could get people to fill out applications, she could perhaps get them to change their lives, since the bus was a traveling classroom, the latest project of the Five Keys Charter School. Shelia had done it — she’d bucked nearly 40 years of failing at school and earned a high school degree. Though to be honest, she hadn’t done it on her first try. Or her second. Or third. Or fourth try, either. By the time Shelia arrived at the Five Keys classroom at 1099 Sunnydale Avenue, in 2014, she’d not learned how to read in high school and dropped out. She’d not learned how to read at San Francisco City College and dropped out. “The lady told me I was wasting my time,” she says. “That I just need to get a job, let the school thing go.” She’d fallen into drugs, prostitution, bad relationships, and jail.

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Buses as Tech Hubs: Way More Than Just Wi-Fi

By Michelle Goldchain

When students in a San Francisco neighborhood were afraid to walk to a community learning center because of the threat of gang violence, an effort was made to bring the learning to them—by bus.

A nonprofit called Five Keys arranged to have a vehicle loaded with Wi-Fi, as well as other tech tools that students can use to meet a variety of academic needs, roll into impoverished communities throughout the city.

The idea of delivering internet connectivity to students and communities via buses is not new. But over the past few years, the scale of those efforts has increased as the mobile tech hubs have been transformed—gutted, reconfigured, and reimagined—so that they provide students with a much broader array of tech access and services than just internet connectivity.

The buses delivered by organizations like Five Keys are staffed with educators who provide academic support for students in different subjects. In some cases, the buses offer full-fledged computer laps where students can prep for the SAT or take part in anti-bullying programs. Some of them come with desks and swivel chairs.

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New route: A bus takes learning to places where the streets are deadl

With the Self-Determination Bus Project, a San Francisco-based nonprofit hopes to address safety issues that keep adults from earning their high school diplomas.

Where Shelia Hill comes from, people get shot for crossing the wrong street.

Visitacion Valley, a district that sits on the southeastern end of San Francisco near the San Mateo County line, has a history of substance abuse, drug dealing, and gang violence going back to the 1970s. It’s not unusual, Ms. Hill says, for young men in the neighborhood to kill each other because they come from rival gang territories – areas that could be just two blocks apart.  

“They can’t even go to the corner store without risking their life,” she says. “It’s crazy, but it’s real.”

Hill’s own salvation had been Five Keys Charter School, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that runs a community learning center in Visitacion, also known as Sunnydale for the avenue that winds through the neighborhood. Hill, 48, spent two years working to get her high school diploma through the program’s independent study plan. Today she’s a full-time teacher’s aide and community ambassador for Five Keys, helping to bring in students from neighborhoods like hers. But she knows that most Sunnydale residents have to put safety before any kind of education – much less a career that would pull them out of a life of violence.

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Mobile classroom bus will steer adults toward a diploma

sfchronicle.com, June 28, 2017
Jill Tucker

Thousands of high school dropouts in San Francisco would like to return to the classroom, but for many, the short distance from home to an adult school might as well be a hundred miles given turf wars, gang ties or other safety concerns.

That’s the challenge described by local education leaders who, starting next month, will bring a classroom to those potential students in the unusual form of a revamped Muni bus stocked with computers, Internet access, and a teacher.

Currently, about 86,000 city residents have not finished high school, including 8,000 in Bayview-Hunters Point, according to Five Keys officials. They believe this is the first mobile school for adults in the country, and plan to expand the program to Oakland and Los Angeles if it is successful.

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