Thousands Of Students Lead A Nationwide Day Of Community Contribution

NEW YORK, May 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On May 4th, 50,000 EL Education students and their teachers will celebrate Better World Day, a day of contribution and civic action to create positive change in their communities. Through more than 100 projects in 24 states, students will bring together community leaders, lawmakers, and fellow citizens to participate in meaningful actions that will lead to a better world.

"For more than 25 years, EL Education students have been engaged in learning with a purpose. Better World Day elevates the work they do everyday and shines a light on schools with a shared mission to enable students to achieve more than they think possible and become active contributors in their communities," said Scott Hartl, President and Chief Executive Officer of EL Education.

Better World Day events are a culmination of months of work by students and teachers to develop projects that will positively impact their communities. Projects taking place in 24 states include:

• Students from The Greene School in West Greenwich, R.I. and University Preparatory Academy in Detroit, Mich. are partnering with Eagle's Nest Academy in Flint, Mich. to collect supplies needed as a result of the water crisis. Rhode Island students will travel to Flint to make door-to-door deliveries of supplies including baby wipes, formula, water filtration devices, and bottled water.
• Students from Presumpscot Elementary School, King Middle School, and Casco Bay High School in Portland, Maine will lead a variety of efforts to give back to their community, including sharing ideas to help the city become sustainable by 2025, rejuvenating local parks and trails, and planting in gardens.
• Kindergarten through eighth-grade students at Chicago's Polaris Charter Academy will host a community forum in a local park that has been plagued by violence in recent years. The forum will be designed to connect residents with local resources as well as generate conversations about how they can come together as a community to curb the violence.
• Students from the Downtown Denver Expeditionary School will partner with other local schools and community organizations to paint a large-scale mural that celebrates the learning happening in the core of downtown Denver and start a conversation about how anyone can participate to make their community better.

"EL Education's creation of Better World Day comes at a critical time in education. It is inspiring to see what our schools are doing across the nation to create high quality work that matters and contributes to a more just world. EL Education's charge to spotlight this work provides great motivation in our community to keep going, dig deeper, push harder, and get even more involved in multiple communities," said Letia Frandina, Interim Executive Director, Downtown Denver Expeditionary School.

The list of the more than 100 schools participating in Better World Day can be found on the EL Education website.

About EL Education
EL Education (formerly Expeditionary Learning) is a leading K-12 nonprofit helping to build great schools in diverse communities across America.  For more than 25 years, EL Education has been bringing to life a three-dimensional vision of student achievement that includes mastery of knowledge and skills, character, and high-quality student work. EL Education works with hundreds of  public schools—both district and charter—across 35 states, serving over 200,000 students and 16,000 teachers. Rigorous impact studies by Mathematica Policy Research demonstrate that EL Education's approach works: teachers significantly improve their craft and students achieve more, regardless of background.

Grounded in decades of in-depth work with educators, EL Education creates highly respected, widely distributed open educational resources, including: an acclaimed literacy curriculum that has been downloaded 8.7 million times and received the highest possible ratings from EdReports.org; the world's largest collection of exemplary student projects; inspiring instructional videos with over 1.3 million views; hundreds of free online resources; and best-selling education books.

SOURCE EL Education

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