The 48-year-old teacher started a girls’ running club that does more than just provide some daily activity.
At any given moment, Aviva Baker will see a dozen or so fourth- and fifth-grade girls stop each other in the hallways of Jackson Elementary School to compare bracelets and necklaces adorned with charms shaped likeand congratulate each other on their accomplishments. When they walk away, their heads are a little higher and their backs are a little straighter.
These girls are part of Club RAD—short for “running and determined.” A few times a week, members of the club can be seen running one to two miles through the neighborhoods of Plant City, Florida, near the school. Baker, the club’s founder, is a fourth-grade teacher at the girls’ high-poverty school, and she gives out these tiny charms when a girl logs her first three miles and then for each two miles completed after that.
“I’ve been running for 22 years, and I love the feeling of challenging myself and that sense of making myself better,” Baker, 48, told. “That’s what I want the girls in the club to take away from the experience. This isn’t just about running, it’s about empowerment.” That’s one of the main reasons Baker started the club in back in January, she said. Ninety-nine percent of the student body gets free or reduced-price lunch, half of her students have a parent in prison—a few have both mother and father incarcerated—and some are in foster care. Baker said that many of the girls face challenges at home because they’re not pushed academically, and their families have low expectations of their futures.
Running has helped Baker deal with her own adversity, but she didn’t expect it would also help her students, until she brought in a
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