About Us
Our Issues
This initiative began as a result of concern regarding the lack of diversity within the AMHS student body. Only 2% of AMHS students are on free and reduced lunch, while a school like Morningside Middle — less than two miles away — is classified as a Title 1 school, with 98% of its students on free and reduced lunch. Located in North Charleston, where the population is 44% African American and 10% Hispanic, 81% of AMHS students are Caucasian while 3% are African Americana and 5% are Hispanic. These disparities are glaring, and are a result of lack of awareness of the school and a lack of resources, like tutoring, to be prepared for the admissions process. The Writing Program aims to encourage applications to the school and provide guidance in tackling the writing sample, one of the most subjective parts of the application, to ultimately increase the variety of perspectives that will benefit the entirety of AMHS and provide underprivileged students an avenue to success.
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And although this mission remains important to our goals, we also want to help middle schoolers improve their writing abilities overall, in order to help them succeed in their other pursuits where communication is a valuable skill.
Our Work
We mainly operate through Google Classroom. By working with the teachers and guidance counselors at the schools we're involved with, we're put into contact with gifted students. These students are then assigned writing prompts based off of old essay prompts used to score Magnet applicants on writing ability, as well as free write practices to encourage the use of personal narratives. When complete, students turn their work in on Google Classroom. Tutors from the AMHS National Honor Society proceed to provide feedback and constructive criticism, highlighting both what needs to be improved and what was already done well. Students receive a grade from 1-4 according to the official AMHS writing sample rubric.
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We also visit schools in person to provide both guidance and to spread awareness of Academic Magnet! We host weekly tutoring sessions at Morningside Middle, and have also paid visits to Northwoods to pass around yearbooks and brochures to better acquaint the students with a Magnet school ranking #1 in the nation just around the corner. It's always great to meet the kids face-to-face and chat about our lives, and we look forward to seeing them each time.