Springside’s in-house tech gurus, iSITE, known within the school community for their go-to service answering any software or hardware question, received the National Coalition of Girls’ Schools’ “Whitty Ransome” award at their annual conference this June. The group was named by Philadelphia magazine last September in their “best of” school issue, under the “student techies” category. Their model also caught the attention of KYW News Radio education reporter Dr. Marciene Mattleman, who recently featured them in an on-air segment.

Education Report on KYW News Radio (5/31/10):

Tech Savvy Kids Put Talents to Use
by KYW’s Dr. Marciene Mattleman



Every school has them—tech-savvy kids that always know how to run the equipment, work the software, and take on any tech-related challenge.
Springside School in Chestnut Hill has mobilized these students, all girls, to become a cadre of go-to tech leaders. They spend their free time during the school year fielding tech support questions from classmates, leading professional development workshops, demonstrating new technologies and software to teachers, and creating a listening library of podcasts for younger students.

They even extended the model to offer a night when folks in the community could come in and have their tech-related questions answered.

Student planned and led in-house tech trouble-shooting is a concept that’s worth developing at other schools—having young people use their tech skills not just for social networking but helping others and staying out of trouble. The model has been so successful that the team will present at a national conference.
Just as important, the girls bought 7 laptops for the One Laptop per Child organization with the proceeds from the community night.
 

The National Coalition of Girls’ Schools’ “Whitty Ransome Prize”: presented by NCGS Executive Director Susanne Beck at the Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA

The Ransome Prize is an annual award of $1,000 presented in honor of NCGS Co-Founder Whitty Ransome (Wilcox), thanks to the generosity of a gift from her husband, Tom Wilcox, in June 2009.

In creating the award, Tom asked that the prize be awarded to a girl or a woman who, in the opinion of the board of NCGS, has uniquely committed herself to the lives of other girls and women, ideally in a revolutionary fashion.

And that the recipients reflect the pure devotion to a higher cause, the willingness to serve others, the grace and readiness to make others look good, that so characterized Whitty Ransome’s commitment to NCGS.

This year’s winners are a group of girls from the Springside School in Philadelphia, who literally answered our “Call to Service” when we alerted our schools that a brand new school for girls located in Kibera, Kenya, the most impoverished community in that country, located within the capital city of Nairobi needed a new website. Over the course of 5-6 months of working lunches, plenty of out of school time and for no academic credit, the girls created a masterpiece. And they went further: They held a Valentine's Day bake sale to raise funds for the project and brought in $300 while helping raise awareness about the school. They surpassed any expectation we might have for the project and fully embodied what Tom Wilcox had in mind when he established the award last year.