LITE Memphis helps close education gap

As students settle in for the new school year, most students returned to their classrooms with renewed enthusiasm.

For high school seniors, that sense of excitement is heightened by the fact that they are standing at the threshold of their futures as they complete their final year. But the opportunities for where they go from here are not equal.

The “Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States, The 45-Year Trend Report” by The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education concluded that high-income kids and lowincome kids differ greatly when it comes to their future opportunities. The study found that for students who come from households with incomes in the top 25 percent, approximately 77 percent will graduate from college by the age of 24. Conversely, for students who come from households in the lowest 25 percent, only 9 percent will do the same.

Here in Memphis, one man is making inroads in lessening this opportunity gap. Hardy Farrow has set up his base of operation in an office at Hutchison School. From there he is running his nonprofit organization, LITE Memphis (Let’s Innovate through Education), on a full-time basis while teaching part-time, two classes per semester, and helping the school with their Entrepreneurship Society. Teaching more than traditional curriculum, Farrow is demonstrating that plugging students into social venture projects is a great idea.

Back in 2013, as a Teach for America corps member at Power Center Academy in Hickory Hill, Farrow noticed his government and economics students were frustrated with creating hypothetical business models and solving made-up problems. Farrow decided to make the problems real and make the solutions meaningful.

“I came into the classroom and noticed students didn’t have the skills they needed for college or the workforce,” Farrow said. “They were disenfranchised from their education. It seemed they were irritated by the class work of developing business plans without actualizing them. I asked the students to tell me about a problem they saw in the community and told them that we would try a different approach, designing out solutions to help them launch their ideas.”

So he embraced a “learn by doing” philosophy and helped students incubate their own ideas through an entrepreneurial curriculum, seed investment and mentor matching. The ultimate goal was to make students more prepared for college or small business by having them actually try out ideas in the same way a business would in the marketplace.

What began as a classroom assignment has now grown into a formal organization as Farrow, 25, takes his inventive approach to building student skills from the classroom to the nonprofit arena. The overall goal of LITE Memphis is to build these essential skills while equipping high school students of all socioeconomic backgrounds with the leadership skills they need to impact their communities. Now following his own advice, Farrow is launching his idea into the community and is seeking partnerships with area schools and businesses.

“A kid can be a straight-A student in high school, but if they come from an impoverished background, the odds are still against them,” Farrow said. “To make a difference, we need to ask ourselves, ‘What can we do as a community to empower these kids?’ We need to build a passion in them for Memphis, as well as give them the grittiness they need to get through college.”

Farrow wants to continue preparing young adults for college, and ultimately for the workforce, by helping them learn to goal-set, to be more organized and to become creative problem solvers. But he also hopes to deepen their love of, and commitment to, their Memphis community. Through LITE, Farrow is building a local workforce with the skills businesses need, but also a network of young, educated professionals who want to live and lead in Memphis.

Farrow’s success with LITE hasn’t gone unnoticed. His project recently won national recognition, receiving one of five National Innovation Awards from Teach for America. Farrow also was awarded the Sue Lehmann award, recognizing him as one of the top 100 best American teachers in their second year of teaching for his instruction in the classroom and his work in the community.

Over the summer, Farrow reached out to area high schools, seeking schools that have leadership in the community and where he thinks there needs to be more opportunities for the students to apply their passions to their own communities. Farrow is working to arrange contracts with schools that have expressed interest, such as Melrose High, Middle College High School and KIPP High School.

Starting with these feeder programs, Farrow trains a facilitator at each school about the curriculum. The program is open to 20 students per school who submit ideas for improving their community. Farrow reviews all of the ideas and picks the top two or three for implementation. Working week after week through a sixmonth process, the ideas are ultimately launched. The goal is two-fold: getting better opportunities for the students, and getting communities to get behind the idea of improving their neighborhoods.

Farrow concluded, “Once we can give two or three students from a school the opportunity to work through the process and successfully launch their projects, they will serve as the fuel for other students to be motivated to try the same thing. As a community, we need to lend our support to empower these students to make a difference in their lives and in their communities.”