INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — Students in a digital media class in the Independence School District are testing a better opportunity for other students their age to connect with educational institutions across the metro through an app called The Connect KC.
This vision all started in 2018 thanks to a group of people including Andrea Ellis, who through research realized kids were not well connected to public educational institutions in our area.
“It really got started with the library asking the question of, can there be a better way to connect young people to the opportunities that exist in our city,” Ellis, the director of strategic learning with the Kansas City Public Library, said. “Questions we were asking were, do you know what exists in Kansas City, to do for somebody your age right? And if so do you attend those things? And if you don’t what prevents you from attending those?"
Ellis realized, after interviewing many children in the metro, that there were barriers that were creating that gap between kids and educational institutions.
“It was those barriers that kind of led to this, okay, how do we solve those barriers, and of the biggest barriers was awareness. Students were like we don’t even know what we can do,” Ellis said.
After working with many partners, she and others realized that the best way to create something for students was involving students in the project like group leader Dominic Hernandez and logo designer Kiersten Playter.
“It’s really interesting to find out about kids my age, they are probably a little bit more underprivileged than me, and just being able to find out that maybe they aren’t able to do stuff that I’m able to do,” Hernandez said.
“So this was my first big project that I did. It was really new, really fun, to see what the client wanted, especially around this app, getting people more involved with the museums and libraries,” Playter said.
Not only will the app provide knowledge about opportunities at these educational institutions, but it will also give students a way to get there through public transportation.
“Really what we are going to do is, we are going to provide a way for students all around the Kansas City area with transportation by giving them events that they have the option to go to,” Hernandez said.
Now with the help of a $1 million dollar grant to pilot the program for over 100 kids between Wyandotte and Jackson Counties during the summer of 2022, Ellis tells KSHB 41 that she is excited to see this vision come to life.
“The biggest importance is, it will help students figure out how to get access opportunities, to interest-driven learning that they might now have known about before,” Ellis said. “To let students or young people know, or try things when they're young. They can kind of figure out what are my next steps? What type of occupational identity do I want to create for myself? Do I really want to go into STEM, into arts, or whatever."
However, Ellis and others are aware of the technology gap that may come with students who live in the urban core. In the meantime, while The Connect KC app is in the early stages, Ellis is thinking of ways to make sure all kids are connected to educational institutions across the metro.
“We are really thinking about how do we build this for any student, to be able to take advantage of, but we know at the end of the day there are going to be costs because you have to have a phone,” Ellis said. “The quest for sustainability for that long run is, how do we work with the cities, with the organizations, the businesses, that are in our community to understand how this can help benefit them in the long run, so that we can start to make investments for kids who don’t have access to that."
