Hayley Glatter: What were your experiences with substitutes like as a student?

Sarah Cherry Rice: I grew up in Arkansas and I distinctly remember when substitute teachers came in, there was always that old VCR cart that would roll out. And if it wasn’t a movie, then it was a worksheet that was passed out that was totally unrelated to anything we were learning in class. It was just meaningless. And I saw that when I was a teacher and when I moved into district leadership, too. Sometimes I’d go into middle-school classrooms and kids were coloring a sheet with crayons—in middle school. And you’re like “Oh my gosh, this whole day, these six or seven hours are totally being wasted.” And sometimes the videos might just be something like Lion King for the 20th time. And I certainly would say that there are substitute teachers out there who try to bring in either experience about their career or bring in something that's a learning experience for students, but oftentimes they were very sparse or very few.

Glatter: So how does Parachute Teachers create a different experience for students compared to the traditional VCR cart rolling in?

Cherry Rice: Part of our thinking was that there’s tons of talent in communities. Currently, community members or families are kind of not welcome in the school. It's “drop your kids at the gate, leave them here with us, pick them up in seven hours, and don't really engage with the classroom or the school.” But how do we bring those talents to schools so the community can share in the learning experience? We believe learning doesn't just happen in the four walls of the school. With the internet, with community engagement, learning is happening everywhere, all the time.

We want to make that learning more accessible to students, especially high-needs students. We have engineers who come into our classrooms and offer coding and 3D printing. There are folks that come in and offer art: watercolors and pottery. We have a farm-to-table cooking curriculum through MIT where farmers in the off-season come in and talk to students. So that time is not lost to learning; there’s real learning that’s connected, hands-on, relevant to real life, and coming directly from folks students pass on the street all the time in their own neighborhoods. The second thing we think about are the connections and the social capital that it gives to students. You can imagine when Parachute Teachers come in and talk about their careers, the different career pathways that students are then exposed to, and the social-capital connections that those students can then leverage. Seeing a woman engineer in their classroom in second grade, or seeing someone that's an ecologist come into their classroom in fourth grade. We think a lot about how this builds social capital to the communities in which these students live.