Rothin Datta

Rothin Datta—2014 Fellow

Year: Class of 2016
Major: Political Science and Education Studies
Organization: Saint Paul Public Schools Community Education

For my fellowship, I had the opportunity to work with Community Education within the Saint Paul Public Schools school district. The school district currently buys a summer correspondence program from another school district in Michigan. The current program doesn’t cater to the specific needs of the students in St. Paul and Community Education hopes to create their own correspondence curriculum by next summer. Community Education needed some way to collect student feedback on the current program and that is where I came in. I worked at various housing projects on the west side of St. Paul with children from Kindergarten to the 4th grade. My job was to run the summer program, while collecting feedback on it from these various groups of students. I was able to make concrete recommendation on how the program should be run as well as how it can be made more accessible to the groups of students that need it the most. My time at Community Education gave me an insight into youth enrichment work in the Twin Cities as well the difficulties involved in creating a single program for a diverse population of students.