To a new possible.

Dear Friends of Rooted School Clark County,

I discovered my "Why" during the semester of my third-grade school year. After coming home from playing with friends, I walked into my home and heard the sound of my mother crying because she and my father were going to lose the home I grew up in. Our neighborhood in Anaheim, California, was gentrifying, and my parents could no longer afford the rise in fees. I was deeply saddened and angered by this. My anger became a seed. From that moment on, I devoted my life to creating the possibility for other children like me to have a better life than their parents.

This potential is what inspired me to found the Rooted School Foundation six years ago and now to apply to open a new public charter school in partnership with Clark County, Nevada by fall 2023. If we are successful, this will be the fourth high school in the Rooted School Network with the mission of providing Youth Personal Pathways to financial freedom.

After a three-year research period to determine if the Rooted School model is a fit for a community in Nevada, our team validated the demand for a small, career-connected high school through hundreds of meetings and conversations with community stakeholders in Las Vegas, focus groups with students, and survey data from area family residents.

Acknowledgment from Opportunity 180 came first, followed by the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance, the Governor’s Workforce Development Board, community leaders, and Clark County business stakeholders, inviting Rooted School to open its school in partnership with the Las Vegas community because of the need to overcome a range of challenges and access opportunities.

Unless there is a significant shift in U.S. policy, it would take 228 years for the average Black family, and 84 years for the average Latino family to obtain the same amount of wealth as the average white family. When it comes to asset building and disrupting multi-generational cycles of poverty, this gap has significant consequences for underrepresented communities served by Clark County School District, whose population is currently 80% non-white and 60% economically disadvantaged.

In consideration of these challenges, which pose a threat to the education and future economic mobility of people of color in the region, Nevada’s Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation projects the Las Vegas Metro area alone will add over 200,000 jobs over the next 5 years. This opportunity makes Southern Nevada one of the fastest-growing job and talent markets in the U.S., however, local business leaders share a concern that the region lacks the skilled labor needed to support this growth. The need to build more pipelines of local talent is urgent.

With Clark County and Southern Nevada facing a shortage of homegrown talent, there is a real possibility that local companies may consider leaving the region in search of the talent they need or continue to outsource roles from the community. This is where we believe Rooted School can work alongside several local stakeholders to pursue transformational work. Currently, no public high school in our target zip codes offers such an opportunity.

At Rooted, we have a core value called "Community", which we define as not ever forgetting where we come from. Bringing Rooted School Clark County to life will not be without its challenges. But, along with many friends like you, we believe that we have the power to build the future, for our children and our community. We believe that opportunity begins now.

Thank you for going on this personal pathway of higher learning with us.

Yours in the effort,

Jonathan Johnson

Founder and CEO, Rooted School Foundation