[MUSIC] Hi, we're here at the American Dream Academy in Phoenix, Arizona where amazing things happen to prepare and support ELLs and their families in the school districts across Phoenix, Arizona. In this module we're going to highlight the many ways in which the American Dream Academy works with parents and with teachers to encourage learning and inspire a life long devotion to education. In this video we're going to introduce you to Mr Alex Perilla, the director. And he's going to give us a brief overview of the mission of the American Dream Academy. >> So the American Dream Academy is a program where we are helping parents understand the education system in America and students in high schools as well. Our primary work really is to see ourselves as opening the door to the transformative power of education and thereby really making the American dream available to the parents who participate in our program. So in a very big way the mission statement is to bring parents and to help them acquire the tools, the knowledge, the confidence to work with schools in order to provide their students the best education possible. But in particular, we're trying to make sure that students who graduate from high school are prepared and able to begin their career at Arizona State University. Since October of 2006 we've graduated approximately 32,000 parents, 7,000 high school students. We've impacted 99,000 children indirectly. We're very proud of those numbers, but they really are reflective in the success stories that we have. I just met with a mother a couple of months ago who attended our program seven times, and I asked her, why seven times? I mean aren't you really just seeing the same thing over and over and over again? She said, well the reason I go to your programs is because they provide me with the opportunity to see other parents who are interested, engaged, and have a positive message about education. She has three children. Her oldest daughter graduated from the American Dream Academy, has now graduated from Arizona State University. She is a teacher in her elementary school. She has a middle son who is a freshman at Arizona State University today in engineering. She has a younger son who's a freshman in high school. And every time I see her, she says he's going to be another ASU graduate. I'm really proud of those numbers, but in particular the personal stories are what really drive me. So, we're involved in probably 250 individual schools, where in the last ten years we've had 699 programs. What is fascinating about the schools that we have here in the Phoenix metropolitan area is that, without exception, the principals and the leadership of those schools really want to work with their parents. And they look to us, they look to the ASU American Dream Academy as an agent that can help them bring the community to their schools. I cannot think of a single school where we had a principal that did not want to participate with parents and did not appreciate our work with them. So the success ladder is really a creation of the Parent Institute, which is an editorial company out of Virginia. They've been terrific partners with us on the curriculum. They came up with the success ladder, and I think it's a fantastic tool. We've applied it to all of our curricula. And it starts with committing to success. And unless you're committed to success as a parent, and you do that because you love your children, you really can't move beyond step one. But once you're committed to success, you have to believe that success is possible. You have to expect success. You can't just be committed to success. You have to want the success and expect success. After that, you find yourself as a lonely person if you don't partner with anyone else. So we suggest become a partner with your school, become a partner with your city, become a partner with your neighborhood, become a partner with your neighbors and with other parents and schools. That's hugely important. For the community that we work with, we want them to understand the requirements for whatever it is they're doing. They need to understand that in order to resolve a problem in the school, they don't necessarily have to walk into the principal's office and yell. There are ways to accomplish these things, and understanding the requirements is really important. Once you do that, we help parents understand what the success factors are. It's reading, it's math, it's science, it's engineering. Those are the things that are important. We want to move parents away from, how's my kid behaving in school to how's my little girl reading? How's my little girl doing in math? How's my little boy doing as an engineer? Those are the critical steps that parents have to learn during the transformation period which lasts eight to ten weeks. And the final thing that I think is really important, and we've shown it through research, is the success plan. It's really important for people to begin to think about what planning means in America. It's really important not just to say I'm going to do this, but to write it out and to occasionally refer to what your plan is. And so we actually have a success plan, an academic success plan. For financial literacy, we have a financial success plan. And we help parents fill that out. And what the research has told us is that parents really appreciate that plan and go through that plan regularly. So, again, the final phase in that ladder is make a success plan, and it's working.
