One morning last year, DTS student Andrea* said she needed to talk. Her science teacher had humiliated her in class, calling her “four-eyes” when she asked for a moment to put her glasses on in order to read a textbook passage out loud. He followed with, “You look so ugly in your glasses, and just so you know, they don’t…
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I first began working with Cristina* almost four years ago. She had been struggling in math for years. Even when her grades began to improve, she couldn’t help but feel intimidated whenever she worked on a new problem. All those years struggling left her convinced that she could never truly do well in math. This year, Cristina’s doing better than…
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Sometimes the kids are going through something big in their lives, and I am so happy to be there for them through those hard times. But it’s also the small daily challenges that I know will have dramatic, long-term effects. A few weeks ago, I had a student looking at the work she needed to get done over the Thanksgiving…
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As the staff member with the least regular personal contact with students and families, I wasn’t sure whether, from my bird’s eye view, I would really see the impact of my own work. I came to DTS not as an educator, but as an attorney who liked to build and better businesses and organizations, and with a passion for advocating…
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Last summer, Drew*, who was 3,000 miles away at Franklin and Marshall College, texted to tell me he was homesick. I knew this feeling well, as I am a first generation college student who chose to leave my home in Los Angeles to attend a college on the other side of the country. Drew, a rising 12th grader at the…
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