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OCTOBER 2004

Philanthropist Eli Broad Awards California School District $500,000
by Lucy Friedland

Shouts of jubilation erupted as billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad announced the winner of his annual scholarship competition in Los Angeles. The $500,000 award, presented to Garden Grove Unified, a school district just south of Los Angeles, is the top prize in a nationwide competition geared toward public schools that have exhibited significant improvement in student performance despite economic hardship, limited resources and urban blight.

Garden Grove Superintendent of Schools, Laura Schwalm, manifestly shaken from the adrenaline rush of the award, told an audience of educators, including President Bush’s Secretary of Education Rod Paige, “We’ve asked our teachers to make some tough changes over the past few years, to get everyone aligned and focused on the same goals. This really validates what we’re doing.” Schwalm went on to thank Eli Broad and The Broad Foundation, and to assure the Los Angeles-based philanthropist that the prize money will provide scholarships for Garden Grove seniors who would otherwise be unable to attend college.

The other districts in final competition for the prize were Boston, Massachusetts, Charlotte, North Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia and Houston, Texas. Each runner-up district will receive $125,000 in scholarship funds. In order to be eligible for the prize, The Broad Foundation mandates the school district serve at least 3500 students between kindergarten and twelfth grade, forty percent of whom must be poor enough to qualify for free or discounted meals at school. In addition, the school districts must be multi-ethnic; all of the five 2004 finalist districts are more than fifty percent “non-white.”

At a luncheon following the award presentation, Broad addressed the current problems facing American schools. “Public education is a crisis we can no longer ignore,” proclaimed Broad, who said there is an ever-widening gap between student achievement and socio-economic level. “The world has changed,” Broad said. “There are two types of workers in the twenty-first century—service workers and highly-skilled ‘knowledge workers.’ We must make sure our children receive enough education to become ‘knowledge workers.’”

The luncheon also featured a speech from U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, who thanked Eli Broad personally for “giving inspiration to urban leaders,” and urged the audience of educators and school superintendents to “kick [their] efforts up a notch” when returning home. Paige said “the narrowing of the education gap is the civil rights issue of our generation” and that the philosophy of Broad’s foundation is consonant with the president’s educational mission of “No Child Left Behind.”

In addition to Eli Broad and Secretary Paige, the audience was introduced to an actual recipient of Broad’s scholarship funds—a first-generation American girl slated to begin UCLA this fall. The student, whose father, a Vietnamese immigrant, is a janitor with little formal education, told the audience she would not be able to attend college were it not for the largesse of the Broad Foundation. At UCLA, she plans to pursue a premedical course of study, eventually becoming an OB/GYN physician.#

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