SONORA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Meet the EAST Conference 2020 team of Sonora Elementary School led by facilitator Josh Worthy!
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Is this your program's first time submitting for the Founder's Award? FACILITATOR: This was not our first time submitting for Founders. It was actually our fourth time. In 2012 we applied as a first-year program. At that point, I'm not sure many elementary programs had entertained the idea of applying for Founder’s. We were awarded the EAST Rising Star Award. In 2013, we were a finalist for the Founder’s Award. We were excited to see HarBer High School win the award that year. In 2014, we applied and actually won! It was super exciting being the first elementary program to finally break through and tell our story on the big stage. We created a "Draw My Life" video for our submission this year. Many of the kids on our team were familiar with that style from YouTube videos from their favorite Vloggers. We just thought it would be a fun and unique way to tell our story. Mr. Worthy really tried to impress on the team that submitting an application for Founder’s is not a video creation competition, it’s a storytelling competition, and we thought the Draw My Life format was the best way to tell our story of the past 12 months.
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Why did you decide to submit an application for the Founder's Award? EAST QUARTERLY | www.EASTinitiative.org
TEAM MEMBER: Mr. Worthy always leaves it up for the team to vote. In the last few years, the team was only interested in smaller competitions or maybe a Cornerstone award. FACILITATOR: The kids felt like we had the projects to showcase and some cool partnerships to feature so they went for it.
Q
Describe what it felt like when you were notified that you were 1 of 4 Founder's Award winners for EAST Conference 2020. TEAM MEMBERS: Shocked. Surprised. Anxious. Mr. Worthy turned on the live-stream late, right as "Sonora Elementary" came across the screen...so he had no idea what it was for. Was it for a Cornerstone award? Maybe a project finalist competition? Then his phone blew up with texts and it suddenly became real. Turns out Mr. Worthy was watching alone in his classroom because he thought they wouldn’t be named for Founder’s Award recipients again, but perhaps Cornerstone winners in the Growth category. He shared the news and live-stream with the kids that afternoon.
