The White County School Board approved a partnership with the Ayers Foundation at Thursday’s night Board of Education meeting.
The Ayers Foundation is college access and counseling program that serves distressed and at-risk Tennessee counties. White County Director of Schools Kurt Dronebarger said that he is excited for students to benefit from the organization’s expertise.
“We know from what we seen that the evidence has been shown in other districts that they are gonna do great things here,” Dronebarger said. “We already have a lot of things in place, we have great students, great teachers, great school counselors, we are excited to partner with them and allow them to take their expertise and keep our students heading in the right direction.”
Dronebarger said that the Ayers Foundation will select two school counselors and a coordinator to join the school system. The new personnel will work with students in middle school, high school, and postsecondary school.
“We have done a really good job in the past several years of working with our graduating seniors to make sure that they have a connection to postsecondary opportunities, but we have lost that personnel in our Tennessee Advise advisors,” Dronebarger said. “So we are excited that the Ayers Foundation is going to be able to come in and give us the opportunity to have some new personnel, more personnel, to work with our students and not work with them just in high school, but in middle school and then in post secondary times as well.”
More counties can expect to begin partnerships with the Ayers Foundation. Dronebarger said that the organization is great resource Upper Cumberland schools.
“It’s just a great opportunity for the Upper Cumberland and I know the Ayers’ vision is for them to be in every high school and every at-risk or distressed county in the state, so we are just glad to be chosen in this round,” Dronebarger said.
