The volunteers with Teach for America are as diverse as the students they hope to inspire.

With résumés boasting high GPAs and SAT scores, extensive leadership, and degrees from schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale, these individuals are more than qualified to plunge into the thriving job market but chose instead to take what they each consider a more rewarding path.

Since 2001, that path has led to Gallup, New Mexico, and the Navajo Nation.

Teach for America is a nationally acclaimed organization dedicated to improving the quality of education in vulnerable school districts throughout the country.

Says its Gallup area executive director, Sean VanBerschot, “There is an achievement gap that exists in the United States. We want to close that achievement gap. We want to provide an excellent opportunity for all children.”

This is accomplished first by a corps of recent college graduates who pledge to teach for two years in a needy area, and second by corps alumni who have gone on to pursue careers in politics, law, and education in order to create more advantageous public policy in these regions.

VanBerschot himself is an alumnus of the Gallup program (formerly known as the Navajo Nation district), and has witnessed firsthand what the Teach for America program can do for our community.

Corps teachers have significantly improved the test scores of the more than 5,000 students a year they reach in this area who are often, at first, three to four grade levels behind.

Their successes reach beyond academia as they work to instill cultural appreciation in their Native American pupils. Through learning and observing sacred Native traditions, inviting parents to school to intersperse classroom dialogue with the Navajo language, and implementing countless other cross-cultural teaching methods, these volunteers ensure students do not view their heritage as commonplace, but embrace it.

Bob Rosebrough, mayor of Gallup, has said, “The mission of Teach for America is truly inspired. The (Gallup area corps) are a rare breed: visionaries who are firmly grounded in reality.”

The teachers for the upcoming school year will be placed in 30 schools in the Zuni, Gallup-McKinley County, Bureau of Indian Affairs - Eastern Navajo Agency area, and Central Consolidated school districts.

They will, however, be rewarded with more than kind words: AmeriCorps, another nonprofit volunteer group, funds Teach for America’s educational award which provides the two-year volunteers with almost $10,000 each to help pay down their student loans.

The newest visionaries have a unique set of experiences that will enrich the 2006-07 school year. Among the 39 of them are Jessica Wyaco, a Zuni Indian who will be going back to her hometown high school to reach out to the younger generation and relate scientific ideas with the Natives’ knowledge.

William McKinley from rural Illinois simply says, “We’re here to serve.”

And Esther Hoffman, sibling of six, decided to come to the Gallup area after being touched by the beauty of the reservation burial ceremony for a close Native American friend.

Each were thrilled upon being accepted to the Teach for America program, and they fully expect to learn as much – if not more – from their students as their students will from them.

Teach for America is helping guarantee the newest generation of Navajo succeed not only now but also in the future, offering an opportunity for them to take that success and bring it to others in our community.

Information: www.teachforamerica.org.