The Public Education Foundation and Hamilton County Schools are featuring local high school graduates as education success stories by putting their faces on billboards throughout the county.LEARN MORE
Find out more about the students involved in the project here.
Once his face is glued onto a giant billboard close to downtown, Terence Kelley doesn’t think his college years will have much room for error.
“It actually motivated me, just the fact that I’m going to be seen on the billboard,” Kelley said. “I can’t slack or disappoint anyone.”
The Public Education Foundation and Hamilton County Schools are pointing to Kelley and other high school graduates as education success stories by putting their faces on billboards throughout the county.
In its third year, the effort will feature 20 college-bound recent graduates.
“It’s a joint project to show that there really are good things happening and also to help promote college, so that children see the billboards and think, ‘Oh, maybe I can go to college, too,'” said Frances Haman-Prewitt, the Public Education Foundation’s director of communications.
So far, about six billboards have been placed. Another six are due each in September and October. Kelley’s is planned to go up early next month.
Haman-Prewitt said the foundation is trying to put students on billboards near the schools they attended. The signs feature students from every Hamilton County high school and show them attending a range of colleges, including the University of Tennessee, Yale, Chattanooga State Community College and Tulane.
Kelley, a graduate of the Howard School of Academics and Technology, is a freshman at Tennessee State and plans to major in political science or English. After graduating, he hopes to pursue a law degree, a goal he says his teachers helped plant.
As early as elementary school, he said, teachers caught on to his opinionated personality, which he thinks will help in the field of law.
Tyner Academy graduate Allie Horvath, now a freshman at Maryville University, also credits her teachers for inspiring her career goal. She’s majoring in secondary education with an emphasis in English and hopes to one day teach at a Title I school like Tyner. Title I schools have a high proportion of low-income students.
Horvath first saw her billboard, on state Highway 153, while driving home from Northgate Mall with her dad.
“He got this huge grin on his face and said, ‘That’s my girl,'” she said. “We kind of had to remind ourselves to watch the road.”