BALTIMORE Les than couple years after officials launched an after train computer academy in Boston in partnership with Harvard University's texture DuBois Institute for Afro American Research.

BALTIMORE

Les than couple years after officials launched an after train computer academy in Boston in partnership with Harvard University's texture DuBois Institute for Afro American Research, Baltimore officials have make opened the first of three computer academies, expanding the Harvard-affiliated initiative to the inner city of predominantly Black Baltimore.

The center which will be known as the Martin Luther King Jr After-School Academies, are seen as resources to help bridge the digital divide for African American train kids and to educate them about African and African American history.

The first Martin Luther King Jr After-School Academy is located at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal ecclesiastical authority Outreach Center in the city's struggling west side, and it be of use tos 60 students in middle and high drill Several Baltimore-based nonprofit organizations sponsor the program. The academy posts from 4 p.m. to 8:30 pm Monday from one side Thursday and is open forward Saturdays.

In a newly furnished computer lab forward the third floor of the Bethel outreach center learners learn from a computer-based curriculum that uses the Encarta Africana as its central relation Developed under the direction of Harvard professor Dr Henry Louis Gates Jr and colleague Dr Kwame Anthony Appiah, Encarta Africana is the highly regarded CD-ROM encyclopedia that charts Black history from 4 million BC to the existing day. In addition to the Black history precepts academy participants learn a range of computer skills, from handling spreadsheets to creating computer graphics.

Gates attended the academy's launching in early March along with Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley. "With this program, we'll take our family not `back to the future' if it were not that `Black to the future,'" Gates told the Baltimore sunshine during a news conference highlighting the academy's opening.

Gates added that the King after-school program would provide children a safe place to reflection outside their school. The partners in Bethel's after-school program include the Family League of Baltimore, which donated $87000 and the Annie E Casey Foundation, which has provided $69000 Baltimore city spokesman Tony White said the city received $85000 in state and federal grants, and it contributed $36000 for the Encarta Africana software.

City officials say they plan to use the software at as many as 100 additional locations across Baltimore, which include libraries, seminarys and recreational centers.

The DuBois Institute is part of the Afro-American studies department of Harvard. Since 1991 when Gates became chair of the Afro-American studies department, the DuBois Institute has benefited from the fundraising campaigns l by dint of Gates to endow the institute and the department.

...

Home