LEARNING THROUGH EDUCATION AND APPLICATION BY PARTNERSHIP
What We Do
In the past few years, a growing reality has set in that the next Big Tech hub is going to be in Texas. This will require a highly educated population, but unfortunately, Texas also has a very uneven spread of those who graduate with 4-year STEM degrees. With so many jobs becoming available and not enough natives to fill them, people are likely to migrate to fill these higher-paying and more stable jobs, pushing out the families who need these jobs the most. By supporting the underrepresented in their exploration of STEM, San Antonio is creating a new diverse generation to uplift the community’s quality of life.
With a rapidly growing population in the greater San Antonio Area there is a larger need for education across the city. While public schools and continued education work to provide the much needed education required to prosper, less and less money has become available to these government-funded institutions. According to Brookings.com, those with just high school diplomas were 39% of the people making between $20,000 and $30,000, while they only account for 8% of those making over $100,000. On the other hand, only 18% of those making $20,000 to $30,000 are college graduates, while college graduates make up 75% of those making over $100,000.
Over the past five years, the state of Texas has created a $5.3 billion hole in the budget allocated to the state's public schools. This has caused increased class sizes, the loss of high-quality teachers and the cancellation of art, music, and computer science programs. According to this University of Texas Study, school districts were able to spend $12,840 more in 2008 on a classroom of 30 high school students than they were in 2016.
There is good news.
The unemployment rate in the greater San Antonio area is dropping. More jobs are becoming available at a rapid rate. The accompanying bad news is that the higher-paying San Antonio jobs are being outsourced from other cities because they are simply not enough individuals with the qualifying skills in San Antonio.
LEAP seeks to provide the supplemental education that is necessary to support both children and adults so we can create a better future as well as a better now.
Learn more about why LEAP is so important in our Theory of Change Brief