The Boston school district is trying something different to cut its dropout rate, which last year was double the state average, as it has been for years, with 40 percent of students in the class of 2008 failing to graduate.
School officials have begun a concerted effort, which they hope will become a national model, to reach out to the thousands of students who disappeared. They opened a small office with an overworked staff at a community center in Roxbury and have been reenrolling hundreds of dropouts.
Much of the hard work of trying to lure students back into the system falls on Marvin Moore and Emmanuel Allen, both former dropouts who went to college, earned degrees, and now call themselves “dropout outreach specialists.’’ They have been reaching out to dropouts for the past three years as employees of the Boston Private Industry Council, a public-private partnership between the city’s schools and employer community that has sought to blunt the dropout rate.
But this year the school gave Moore and Allen the help they have needed to get the job done. They now have a budget of about $325,000 and a full-time staff that includes a guidance councilor, a teacher, a truancy specialist, and a director, each of whom has played a role in trying to find students, examine their academic record, counsel them, place them in the appropriate school or program, and follow up with them to make sure they stick with it.
Here from the dedicated counselors and the at-risk students themselves in this candid video form the Boston Globe:
Full Story @ link : http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2009/09/18/coaxing_dropouts_back_in/
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