Grace Elam
Grace is a student at the University of California Berkeley and former Campaign Intern at Evolve.
Why is education important to you?
Growing up in the Bay Area, I’ve been able to meet students across multiple school districts, with varying levels of funding and resources. What I’ve seen is that inequality begins at the very earliest stages of life, namely early education. A good education is what gives students the resources, opportunities, and knowledge base to build a successful future, and a poorly-funded education has the inverse result: it puts students in poorly-funded districts at a severe disadvantage. While I’ve met students in Marin and Oakland with equivalent passion and ambition, I’ve seen that the better-funded, North Bay districts are able to provide their students with much more support towards finding internships and jobs that expand their knowledge base and advance their career, while East Bay districts often struggle to meet the student demand with the counselors that they are able to pay for.
How has California's lack of education funding negatively impacted you?
The public high school that I attended in San Francisco was an administrative mess. In order to make ends meet with funding, the school had to accept more and more students each year. I began my freshman year with approximately 600 students across all four grades. By the time I graduated, the school had a student population of 800: a 30% increase in just four years. We received no additional classrooms, which meant that class sizes also increased by a third in just the four years that I attended. Classrooms were already overcrowded when I was admitted, so I can only imagine how much worse it was for the freshman four years later. Also as a result of the unprecedented expansion, the staff turnover rates were ridiculous: in each of the four years that I attended, at least two new teachers were hired, which led to switching up classes in the middle of the semester and immeasurable chaos as far as curriculum was concerned. Additionally, counselors were completely overwhelmed: no student felt sufficiently supported by the administrative staff, simply because the staff was stretched too thin across the growing population.
How has the increasing cost of college impacted you?
The rising costs of even public universities across California has led to unprecedented financial strain for my family. Tax season becomes more and more stressful every year, and in order to meet tuition demands, I am no longer able to take real breaks when school is not in session. During this last summer, I worked three paid jobs in order to help fund just my first year of college. As stressful as all of this may be for me, I know it is much, much worse for many of my peers. I am fortunate to be able to pay for my school by working three jobs: some of my classmates in high school didn’t even have that option, and instead now attend free community colleges with fewer resources than UC Berkeley, or are unable to attend college this year at all because they instead need to work and save money for tuition.