Community invited to help 'spruce up' area schools

On the morning of June 25, the New Memphis Institute will partner with Promise Academy, Treadwell Elementary, Humes Prepatory Academy, and Clean Memphis for a community-wide school spruce-up service day. The event will begin with free breakfast followed by painting and gardening at each of the three schools.

The event came into existence after the New Memphis Institute put on a similar event last fall for their Embark graduates called the Back-to-School series, in which alumni were given the opportunity to volunteer for local schools. The series proved to be a successful “tester” and later led to the planning of the school spruce-up event. However, this school spruce-up event is community-wide, inviting everyone from New Memphis’s current participants and graduates to local employers and their friends to come out and give back.

According to the New Memphis Institute’s Director of Talent Retention Initiatives Robbye Good, “There’s added benefit of bringing our network into [local] schools so they can feel a larger sense of connectivity to the schools in our community. If you don’t have kids that are going to school, it can be easy to forget how schools are foundational to society.”

Dr. Tanisha Heaston, the principal of Treadwell Elementary, is excited to use this event to expand Treadwell Elementary’s community. “One of the things that I hope to do is to forge relationships that go above and beyond June 25th,” she says. “I want to establish a partnership with the New Memphis Institute and I also want to make sure the community that partners with us understands Treadwell is their school and they should take pride in it just as much as we do.”

Both Good and Heaston thinks that there will be a lasting impact from the event that will improve not only the schools’ aesthetic beauty, but also the community. “To me, [this event] means that outside entities are interested in seeing our school prosper,” says Heaston. “Educating our students holistically is very important to me and every inch of the building from the outside to the inside to the people that come in it, help to support academic achievement.”

Good adds that “refocusing on these [educational] centers of a neighborhood, and investing in them beyond tax dollars allocated through some state or district equation” is the indirect, positive outcome that both the New Memphis Institute and the local schools are hoping to achieve through the school spruce-up event.