LAPLACE – Marathon Ashland Petroleum announced that it will sponsor a Teach For America teacher at East St. John Elementary School. The corporation will present Teach For America with a $6,000 check to help defray expenses associated with recruiting, selecting, training and providing on-going support for one of the fifteen corps members teaching in St. John the Baptist Parish (and 145 Teach For America corps members working throughout Greater New Orleans) this year.

The check was presented Tuesday in the classroom of Corps Members Matt Mellon and Sarah Hunt Young, teachers that share a third grade class at East St. John Elementary School. This is the fifth year of the partnership between Marathon Ashland Petroleum and Teach For America.

Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in low-income urban and rural communities and become life-long advocates to expand opportunity for children. Corps members go above and beyond traditional expectations to impact the lives of children growing up in low-income communities. Beyond their two years, corps members take their insight and added commitment to assume leadership roles from inside education and from every other sector and to work toward the fundamental changes necessary to provide more equal opportunities for all children in our nation. Since Teach For America placed its first 500 corps members in classrooms in 1990, more than 12,000 outstanding college graduates have joined its movement to eliminate educational inequity. As of 2005, corps members teach in 22 locations in underserved communities across the country. For more information on Teach For America, please visit: www.teachforamerica.org

Teach For America announced today it received a record 17,000 applications

for its 2005 teaching corps. At a time when jobless claims are the lowest in over four years, this represents a 29 percent increase from 2004 in the number of total applicants. Applications grew even more significantly – by 39 percent – among current college seniors.

Twelve percent of the senior classes of Yale and Spelman College applied to Teach For America, as did 11 percent of the graduating classes at Dartmouth and University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and 8 percent at Princeton and Harvard

(See Marathon, Page 9A)

From this large pool of high quality applicants, Teach For America anticipates approximately 2,000 new corps members will be placed as teachers in low-income communities across the country in the fall.