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Dear friends, As we enter 2024, we are excited to bring you a monthly newsletter to keep you connected to our work. JET’s mission is to provide expert college admissions advising, financial aid guidance, and multi-year 1:1 mentoring to ethnic-racially diverse cohorts of Massachusetts paraeducators who aspire to obtain a bachelor’s degree and Massachusetts teaching license. We prioritize working with communities where the ethnic-racial diversity of the student population does not align with the ethnic-racial composition of the teacher workforce. We are looking forward to continued and strengthened partnership with school districts across the Commonwealth. There is much yet to be done to ensure that every student in the Commonwealth has access to one of the most essential resources in their education: a highly skilled teacher who shares their racial-ethnic identity. JET works to close this resource gap by creating seamless pipelines with our district partners for paraeducators to become licensed educators. We are proud of what we accomplished in 2023, and grateful to the partners, supporters, and friends who made it possible. Last year, we: Welcomed our new Executive Director, Andrea Zayas, in October, and brought two of our team members on as full-time staff Supported 70 in-service paraprofessionals throughout the state of Massachusetts with mentorship and coaching Implemented employee benefits as an initial step to promote employee well-being and health, bringing balance to our work Held a restorative, impact-focused staff retreat in December where we honed our mission language, clarified our commitment to prioritizing racially and ethnically underrepresented paraeducators, and began planning for spring programming Were awarded a three year, $225K grant from the Balfour Foundation
This year, JET will undergo a strategic refresh to ensure that our efforts and energy are being directed for highest impact. If you are interested in participating in this process, please reach out to us at info@jetintoteaching.org. Pam Herrup, who co-founded JET and served as Interim Director for some time has fully transitioned out of leadership at JET. She will continue to cheerlead our work as Chair of our volunteer, non-profit Board of Directors. We are so grateful for her contributions to the organization’s early development! If you are a school district or school leader interested in working with JET to support your educator pipeline, please reach out to us at info@jetintoteaching.org. If you are a paraeducator interested in JET’s support, look out for our 2024-25 cohort application which drops on January 16th—see more details below. We can’t wait to welcome the new group to our community! All the best to you in 2024! The JET Team
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