2009 - Q2 Barton Award winners. Students at SJA and CHS join to ...

If you told Allison El Koubi, a
bright student at New York’s
Houghton College, that her
dream job would be principal
of a poor middle school in rural
Louisiana, she might not have
bitten. Eight years later, that’s
what happened.
A college senior in 2000, El
Koubi decided to delay traditional
job options for service. She and her likeminded
roommates wanted to give back before
the pressure to make money set in, and they began
researching programs, including AmeriCorps
and CityYear, which promised to channel their idealism
into the greater good. For El Koubi, one option
emerged.
“Teach for America really appealed to me,” she
recalls. “My parents are educators, and I liked the
idea of teaching. I saw myself teaching French in
Acadiana.” She applied, and was among the 10% of
applicants the national teacher corps accepts annually.
Late that summer, fresh out of a grueling
five-week training camp in Houston, El Koubi began
a two-year commitment to teach in Louisiana—
not in Acadiana, but in Jackson, where the
underperforming Jackson Middle School needed
an English teacher.
Founded in 1990, Teach for America places
top college graduates in urban and rural schools
around the country, including ones in Baton Rouge,
New Orleans and their surrounding areas. More
than 500 young men and women have served in
Louisiana. Like their counterparts nationwide, they
come with sharp leadership skills and a drive to
succeed.
But they say teaching is the most difficult thing
they’ve attempted.
“I would start every morning with a stomachache,”
recalls El Koubi. “I felt like I was floundering,
like I wasn’t reaching them at all.”
“I would start every morning
with a stomach-ache. I felt
like I was floundering, like I
wasn’t reaching them at all.”
—Allison El Koubi
Then, El Koubi found her footing, and fear was
trumped by another emotion.
“I just fell in love with my students and the community,”
she says. Buoyed by a sense of unbridled
optimism and what she calls “massive indignation”
at the country’s education inequities, she relentlessly
sought opportunities for her students,
landing grants for artists-in-residence,
helping
eighth graders Donors of the Baton Rouge Area
craft an original play
Foundation have made nearly
called “What’s race
200 grants totaling $1.2 million
got to do with it,” and
organizing a field trip to Teach for America.
for choral students to
perform at a music
festival in her hometown, St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Her two-year commitment at Jackson Middle
quickly turned into five years.
“I knew then I was going to devote my entire
professional career to education,” she recalls.
37
She beefed up her management skills by earning
back-to-back accelerated master’s degrees in education
and business, then taught math at the KIPP
Center City Academy in New Orleans just to learn
more about the school’s well-regarded methodology.
When she heard about an opening for a principal
back at Jackson Middle, she said she made a
beeline.
“I put all other options on hold,” she says.
El Koubi got the job last year, and in her short
tenure, she has instituted new systems, set clear
Currents Q2 | 2009