A Viable Choice for the High School "Dropout"
In the 1980’s, a Cleveland State University study concluded that the existence of the Catholic Diocesan schools served as a stabilizing factor for ‘brain drain’ in Cleveland. I am sure that truism was responsible for countless other metropolitan areas where these schools and like dedicated institutions existed. Publicly funded school adherents would like to deny the value of these schools, but they have served a historically under-served population for generations and salvaged great numbers of children and families.
With the Supreme Court voucher approval of June 2002, voucher schools and the establishment of charter/community schools in Ohio and other states has offered additional means of serving the underclass. These schools can serve a like role in preventing “sprawl” and “metropolitan creep” that is costly to all of us with added highways and infrastructure of every kind. Close-in suburbs are suffering the fate of large metropolitan areas, too. They all need productive “choice” options.
Am I saying traditional public funded schools have failed a large segment of students? Yes. They may well serve those better motivated, but they generally are not able to reach the thousands from dysfunctional families, and do not possess the level of interest and caring I have seen at alternative schools that have been created in recent years.
Unusual schools have been introduced, one being Life Skills schools by an Ohio developer White Hat Management, Co., in Akron, Ohio. Entrepreneur David L. Brennan, as an industrialist, found his employees not sufficiently educated in English and math in particular, to operate newer machinery. He then started schooling sessions of his own, and finally K-8 voucher schools, and in time the Life Skills offering. They round out school offerings with virtual reality computer schools that are exploding with growth.
Brennan has a special concern for the high school dropout and waxes enthusiastically about his Life Skills schools serving this cohort. “They are the only body of people who are not given a second chance,” he says and as such, Brennan labors mightily to have them succeed. Many indeed have, as they gain their high school diploma - not a G.E.D. - with heavy computer work and counseling in the morning, and jobs that White Hat assists them in securing in the afternoon.
This ‘dropout’ group has its own dropout rate of 1-3 despite all of White Hat’s efforts, but it has a great number of success stories, too. They have graduated 2,700 students from Life Skills in four years, and spared them the fate of many of their former public funded school buddies who may well have been incarcerated or at best are found working the local McDonalds or other low wage jobs. Some have gone to further study at community colleges and four-year institutions of higher learning.
Rather than accept new members in the profession, public funded counterparts prefer to obstruct new entries endowed with choice, rather than work with them to enhance opportunities for all children. Government schools may well wish to maintain the classic structure of the last one hundred and fifty years, but at the same time they should welcome those alternatives dedicated and crafted differently which serve special education niches. Instead, they often refuse to allow these alternative schools to bid on unused buildings that they themselves have abandoned. The result is abandoned neighborhoods and areas allowed to deteriorate. Church-related schools remain where they can at great personal cost, educating those quite often not of their own persuasion, but they do so because they see their task as strongly needed.
Alternative education organizations will continue their quest for the most part unabated until the public at large wakes up to the fact that government schools are failing and that they do not and should not have a monopoly of public funds or our children’s education. The classic public funded schools of today would never have thought of a school such as Life Skills. It is not labor- intensive enough.
Government schools do not make the best use of computers and they continue to favor the high labor content that pay millions of dollars in dues, which in turn fill the political ‘doggy bags’ of countless politicians who support them. “Damn the kids in need. We need to feed the ravenous union treasury!” So these dropout children are abandoned to the streets.
Brennan and others like him are determined to make lemonade out of lemons and they are succeeding.
Charles Byrne is a resident of Cleveland and a former member of the State Board of Education.
