New App to Create a Culture of High Expectations Among Latino Kids

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Low expectations for Latino kids is a modifiable factor that negatively influences their health, academic success, and future.

In order and build a culture of higher expectations, kids need positive messaging in school and in the home.

Lionel Sosa, a legend in Hispanic marketing and former Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, created Yes! Our Kids Can, a digital education system, to raise expectations for Latino youths growing up in poverty. Rather than expect parents to go into schools, this app-based tool allows families to bring it into their homes to set goals for their kids and encourage them to go go college.

Technology plays an important role in reaching and engaging Latino kids.

Sosa previously worked as a media consultant for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and through personal and professional experience concluded that low expectations were one of the most destructive barriers Latino kids faced.

Sosa and John Andrade-now president of Yes! Our Kids Can-applied for and received a Santikos Foundation grant for $65,000 to pilot this app with 2nd and 3rd graders at Somerset Elementary School in Somerset, Texas (78.8% Latino) in March 2017. Texas A&M University-San Antonio is conducting an independent study to provide results on the effectiveness of the program.

“Going to work to help the family, doesn’t help the family,” Andrade, said according to one source. “We want to dispel that myth.”

Learn more here and watch a video about an introduction of Yes! Our Kids Can in P.F. Stewart Elementary School in San Antonio, TX (63% Latino).