City Year Jacksonville says 56 student success coaches in its 2025-26 cohort devoted an estimated 100,000 service hours at Duval County Public Schools. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on June 3, 2026 at 1:30 pm
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Investment in schools is not exclusively about money. City Year Jacksonville infuses time and talent in Duval County Public Schools that need additional resources.
“This is service: locally focused and deeply human,” City Year Jacksonville Executive Director Dawn Emerick says. “Yes, we are helping students in schools; but, we are also investing in youth.”
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The City Year program is for young adults between 18 and 25 years old. It is a part of the AmeriCorps, a national project that serves communities through volunteerism and community service. Emerick says City Year Jacksonville designed to cultivate communication skills, empathy, problem-solving and leadership within young adults, by having them work with school-aged children.
Some City Year Jacksonville personnel are in a gap year after high school. Others have completed their undergraduate studies. Then, there is Taia Wright.
Wright earned a master’s degree from Valdosta State University and was living in Atlanta, working as a data analyst and was a professional who had little interest in working with children again.
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A new path formed. Wright took it.
Wright spent the 2025-26 academic year working with third grade students at Jacksonville Heights Elementary. The pivot improved her communication and collaboration and forged leadership traits she was unsure she possessed.
“I wanted to pour into them socially and emotionally,” Wright says. “Each of them learns differently. It was important to pour into them. Some needed to be affirmed more; others needed more of a hand-hold.”
Wright was among 56 people who devoted an estimated 100,000 hours at nine local schools in the 2025-26 academic year. The seven elementary schools and two middle schools were selected because they were below the district third grade literacy proficiency rate or their attendance lagged behind the overall district rate.
Duval County Public Schools had the lowest attendance rate of Florida’s six large urban districts in the 2024-25 academic year, with 89.1% of students present. District officials have long believed a key to student success is ensuring they come to school.
All nine campuses are Title I schools. They educate students in Wesconnett, Springfield and Sherwood, but also in San Jose and East Arlington near Kernan Boulevard.
Initially the program focused on mentoring high school underclassmen. However, after the COVID-19 pandemic escalated Duval attendance rates, City Year shifted its focus to elementary and middle school students.
“There is need all over Duval,” Emerick says. “We are not just looking at socio-economics. We are looking at math, reading, attendance and bfehavior. When we are working with the district, we are looking at those four filters, and then, we look at the overlay of socioeconomics.”
The City Year personnel are not teachers. They are support staff who provided additional resources inside schools, including student mentorship, facilitating extracurricular activities on campus or leading student service projects.
Since City Year Jacksonville launched in 2013, more than 700 young adults have completed the program.
In the high humidity of an early summer morning, two dozen young adults stood outside a former library. They wore red jackets. They chanted and energized pedestrians as they walked through Downtown.
“This is where you see the rubber meet the road,” Emerick says. “They are spending 50 hours a week hip-to-hip with teachers. They are assisting students who need help with math and reading.”
