Teach For America accepts Boardman/Mount Union grad
Staff report
New York
Teach For America has announced that Katherine McConnell, a Youngstown native, has been accepted to the organization’s 2011 corps.
Teach For America is the national corps of top recent college graduates who commit to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in the pursuit of educational equity.
McConnell is a 2007 graduate of Boardman High School and 2011 graduate of the University of Mount Union. McConnell will teach in Connecticut.
This year, nearly 48,000 individuals applied, and 11 percent were accepted.
Applicants included 12 percent of Ivy League seniors, 10 percent of seniors at Howard University, 8 percent at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and 5 percent at the University of Texas at Austin.
McConnell joins Teach For America’s incoming corps of 5,200 new teachers.
These corps members earned an average undergraduate GPA of 3.6, and 100 percent had leadership positions while in college.
The diversity of the 2011 corps reflects Teach For America’s focus on recruiting individuals who share the racial and socioeconomic backgrounds of the students it reaches.
One-third of incoming corps members identify as people of color, including 12 percent who are black and 8 percent who are Hispanic. Twenty-two percent are the first in their family to graduate from college, and nearly one-third received Pell Grants.
Twenty-three percent are graduate students or professionals.