New student-led program aims at dropouts

Faced with nearly half of Chicago Public Schools freshmen dropping out before they graduate, education leaders plan to announce Thursday a student-led program to help struggling students at eight high schools.

The initiative is the brainchild of a group of students that looked at the problem during the last year and calls for setting up individual plans to keep students in school, setting up retreats to help them stay focused on graduating and having students review curriculum to make it more meaningful.

It comes after more than 52 Chicago high school students spent the last year surveying more than 1,325 students and hundreds of parents and teachers about the district's dropout problem.

The group found that students blamed themselves for dropping out of school. Nearly one-quarter said a lack of motivation or laziness by students was the main reason for the high dropout rate. Many others said teenage pregnancy was another issue.

But when pressed by the student researchers, the survey found that students said they were not being engaged or motivated by teachers or the curriculum. They also cited safety concerns, said Hennessy Williams, a Kenwood Academy junior who helped conduct the surveys.

"When you encourage somebody, they can go a long way. When we were doing our interviews that's what was mostly coming up --that they wanted some support," said Williams, 18.

Williams and the other students worked as part of Voices of Youth in Chicago Education, a coalition of youth leaders from community organizations and high schools throughout the city.

The program, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the non-profit Communities for Public Education Reform, took students to districts in five other states. The high schools taking part in the test program are Dyett, Gage Park, Kelly, Kelvyn Park, Kenwood, Perspectives, Roosevelt and Senn.

Among the initiatives, the program asks schools to develop leadership teams made of students working with adults to offer student input on issues. They will conduct focus groups to review curriculum and textbooks to make them more relevant, officials said.

The schools will offer retreats three times a year to struggling freshmen who have been identified by teachers, principals or other students. Students will get one-on-one counseling from teachers, counselors and upperclassmen to help develop four-year plans with the goal of graduating high school.

Number of U.S. Hungry Kids Jumped 50% Last Year

Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than double the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

Non-Election Edition: The Death of a School

Via Progressive Historians, "Open Campus"

Jane Cooper Elementary sits gutted in one of the worst parts of one of the most impoverished and dangerous cities in the richest nation in the world. In the late 1990s, Mayor Dennis Archer's office identified this neighborhood as having "more children, more people living in poverty, a greater proportion of high school dropouts, and a larger percentage of violent juvenile offenses than the city as a whole." Which, in Detroit, is saying quite a bit.