Why the Detroit graduation rate for black boy sis 37 percent
To me, this story doesn’t break it down by gender enough. Girls face many of these same pressures, and yet their numbers are significantly better.
November 15, 2009
Summit aims to keep young men in school
Boys to Men links at-risk youths with community mentors
BY MEGHA SATYANARAYANA
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Some have absent parents. Others can’t afford to eat. Or live in homes at risk of having the electricity cut off. Others fall into drugs, gangs and violence.
Those are some of the reasons that so many Detroit boys drop out of school, according to a group of 250 students, educators, parents and community leaders that gathered Saturday for a summit held at Wayne County Community College District to help address the problem and come up with solutions.
For Steven Abdullah, 18, a senior at Finney High School and Life Skills of Detroit, it’s about money.
“We are dropping out because of bus fare,” Abdullah said.
He sometimes struggles to pay for the bus to get to Life Skills, a school for working students in the district.
The Vanguard Community Development Corp.’s Boys to Men summit included a round-table discussion with a judge, corrections officer, educator and former prisoner, as well as opening remarks from Detroit Mayor Dave Bing. The event continued with breakout sessions in the afternoon.
The graduation rate for Detroit boys is 37.5%, one of the worst in the nation, according to the Cities in Crisis 2009: Closing the Graduation Gap by America’s Promise Alliance, a child advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
Robert Counts, director of education at Vanguard, said the take-home message from Saturday’s event is “Somebody does care about you. They have a resource available to them. They don’t hear that at home,” he said.
Terrell Topps, who spent 15 years in prison, urged the boys not to see prison as cool.
“202035 is my prison number. It’s a scarlet letter, not a badge of honor,” Topps said.
Topps led a discussion with 27 of the boys in the afternoon, where some talked about dealing drugs as fast money and a ticket to freedom. Topps told the boys to move beyond pride and ask for help.
Some of the kids talked about ways around the temptation of easy cash by drugs.
“Sports help,” said Tommie Bush, 16, a Detroit sophomore and basketball player at Michigan Collegiate High School in Warren.
“With sports year-round, you don’t have time to get in trouble,” said his classmate and teammate Elroy Daffin, 17, a senior, also from Detroit.
“These young men can be the cornerstone of this city coming back,” said Bing, who gave opening remarks and stayed for the morning round-table discussion.
Abdullah said he has been without parents since he was 13. He said his friends, some of whom deal drugs, are considered the “wrong crowd,” but he defends their choices while trying to keep his nose in his books, and trying to figure out how to pay for sound engineering college next year.
In the afternoon, Abdullah got a surprise — a bus pass provided by Sean Vann, principal of Frederick Douglass Academy, an all-boys high school in Detroit with a 100% graduation rate.
It’s not pity, said Vann. It’s love.
Contact MEGHA SATYANARAYANA: 313-223-4544 or megha@freepress.com
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The Vanguard Community Development Corp. runs a drop-out prevention program called Boys to Men in collaboration with Northwestern High School in Detroit, Wayne County Community College District and Wayne State University College of Education. The program works on academic skills and provides mentoring to young men.
• For information, contact Robert Counts, Vanguard director of education, at rcounts@vanguardcdc.org or 313-872-7831 ext. 22.
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Tags: detroit
November 15th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
This story is just amazing coming on the same weekend as the piece on Meet The Press. I really think that those in charge, whether it be Arne Duncan or Michelle Rhee are just not living in the same world as people like Abdullah in this story. At the end of the story they had this: “Abdullah said he has been without parents since he was 13. He said his friends, some of whom deal drugs, are considered the “wrong crowd,” but he defends their choices while trying to keep his nose in his books, and trying to figure out how to pay for sound engineering college next year. In the afternoon, Abdullah got a surprise — a bus pass provided by Sean Vann, principal of Frederick Douglass Academy, an all-boys high school in Detroit with a 100% graduation rate. It’s not pity, said Vann. It’s love.” This was in response to, earlier in the story, Abdullah saying that he was considering dropping out simply because he couldn’t always come up with the bus fare. Detroit is ground zero. If Detroit can be turned around, any school district in the country can be turned around, but it seems like such an impossible task on those mean streets. And let me mention that nowhere in the article was there any mention of girls. One thing that is usually the case is that, when things get bad enough, even groups like the AAUW have to back off and concede the magnitude of the problem. Detroit may be a place where even they have to concede that something has got to be done that is focused on the majority of boys who are dropping out. I just wish that they had mentioned this summit on Meet The Press, because it would have forced them to bring gender into the discussion.