MAC Scholars

The MAC Scholars Program is a student-led program aimed at improving the academic achievement of African-American students in Shaker Heights City Schools. This program includes males and females, starting in fourth grade, and continuing through twelfth grade. Some highlights of the program include our elementary MAC Scholar students collecting various items for Laura’s Home Women’s Shelter and the City Mission of Cleveland. Our MAC Scholars, both male and female, have also visited nursing homes, cleaned shelters and presented programs to students and faculty within our Shaker Heights City School District. Our intermediate through high school MAC Scholars have served in the community by mentoring younger MAC students to excel in not only academics, but in leadership skills as well. Many of our MAC Scholars alumni have continued to be leaders in their fields of medicine, education, law, civil justice, politics and community-based organizations to further collective unity, pride and empowerment to our African-American community.  

Widely emulated by schools all over the United States, the program was initiated by high-achieving African-American students in 1990 and has since spread district-wide in Shaker Heights Schools, including all five elementary schools, Woodbury, Shaker Heights Middle School and Shaker Heights High School. Key elements of the program include:

1. Setting goals
2. Growing leadership skills, and encouraging  positive social and emotional growth.
3. Engaging  in a scholarly community of learners that include mentoring, academic engagement, and community service
4. Empowering the members to create a sister and brotherhood of support and encouragement.
5. Encouraging responsibility for our community, school and global community.

The MAC program is continually evolving, refining techniques that work, experimenting with new ones and expanding the dimensions of the project. Each year, the program takes on a slightly different character as the new leaders bring to it their special talents.

What remains constant are the leadership, wisdom and integrity of a group of high-achieving black male and female student leaders who have assumed some measure of responsibility for reversing the disturbing downward trend of their younger counterparts. The Scholars are steadfast in their belief that they can make an important difference and that their mission is to restore hope in the younger students that they will, indeed, have futures that hold promise.