Featured Student: Nashira

Nashira confesses that she had mixed feelings at first about spending her summer in school. That changed once the program began. “On the first day, I was so excited!” she says. “The classes, the teachers – we had so much fun.”

Nashira fit right in at Breakthrough and worked hard. In math class, she studied operations with fractions and positive and negative integers. She discovered a knack for problem solving, and liked the math-related games and her teacher Jeena’s insistence that every student learn the material – “She wouldn’t stop teaching until we really knew it.” In planetary science, Nashira learned about gravity, atmosphere, and the water cycle, and made a model of Earth for her end-of-summer project. In writing class, a unique voice began to emerge – one full of sensory detail, and with solid paragraph structure.

A cheerleader and dancer, Nashira was enthusiastic pretty much all the time. She helped her club earn the Most Spirited award, and pushed her advisory to win the Breakthrough-wide reading competition. On Culture Day, she performed a West African dance with her mom – a mother-daughter moment that brought cheers from the audience. She also made it several rounds into the water balloon toss at Olympics before finally getting soaked.

Nashira is heading this fall to San Francisco School, where she was admitted with Breakthrough’s help. As might be expected, she feels some anxiety. Yet with the time she’s spent at Breakthrough, Nashira also feels she is ahead of the game. She will also continue to attend Breakthrough’s after school program, and loves the program she was initially unsure about.

“Nashira, thank you for all of your energy and enthusiasm,” wrote Aida, her humanities teacher at Breakthrough. “My memory of your attitude and the atmosphere that you created in class makes me want to continue teaching in the future.”