April 16, 2008
Corporate Fund to Spend $100-Million to Prevent School Dropouts
By Anne Howard
The AT&T Foundation, in San Antonio, on Thursday plans to announce a $100-million grant-making program that seeks to keep students in school and prepare them for college or a career.
Over four years, the foundation will make grants to hundreds of schools and nonprofit groups, sponsor research on high-school dropouts, engage its employees as mentors, and hold 100 community meetings — one in every state and one in each of the 50 largest American cities — to raise awareness of the nation’s dropout problem and devise solutions to stem the trend.
America’s Promise Alliance, a Washington-based network of charities, companies, foundations, legislators, and religious groups that works for children and youths, will lead those meetings. The organization says that more than 1.1 million students drop out of school each year, and that half the students in the largest American cities are not graduating from high school.
Marguerite Kondracke, president of America’s Promise Alliance, said the drop-out rate is a trend that threatens American competitiveness in the international market.
“It’s not only a moral crisis, it’s an economic crisis,” she said.
The AT&T Foundation has long concentrated its philanthropy on education, but Laura Sanford, the fund’s president, said that by focusing on a specific aspect of the problems facing schools, it hopes its grant making would be more effective.
“Grants that we’re giving out in this program are larger amounts” than grants in previous years, she said. “We want to achieve issue impact.”
The foundation will support research by John Bridgeland, chief executive officer of Civic Enterprises, in Washington, and the author of the 2006 study “Silent Epidemic,” which surveyed high-school dropouts to figure out why they left school and what might have helped them stay. The new research will ask teachers, administrators, principals, and other school leaders about their perspective on the dropout problem in the United States.
Ms. Sanford said that beyond the money the foundation spends, it hopes its employees — from entry-level technicians to longtime executives, she said — will make a difference by serving as as mentors for 100,000 students, in grades 9 through 12, in a job-shadowing program. Junior Achievement, in Colorado Springs, will help the foundation administer the effort.
Students often can’t see the connection between the work they do in school and their future careers, Ms. Sanford said, and learning first-hand about how an education relates to potential jobs in technology may help bridge that gap.
“What we found is that dropouts themselves identified that the curriculum that is presented to them was not relevant to practical application in life,” she said.
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We operate a Charter School and YouthBuild Program for high school dropouts and would love for our youth to be connected to this initiative. Is there a way to have East St. Louis Youth involved in this initiative, or have the schools already been selected? Please contact me at the e-mail address above or at 618-920-8344. Our website is www.emersonpark.org
— Vickie Kimmel Forby Apr 22, 10:14 PM #
We have a Youth Build Program in Albuquerque New Mexico, and we are very interested in applying for any potential resource for our program. Thanks for your consideration.
Lorenzo Garcia
Executive Director
Youth Building Better Lives, Albuquerque New Mexico 505-228-3063 (cell), 505-515-2515 work
— Lorenzo Garcia Apr 23, 11:18 AM #
We are a non-profit mentoring service for youth between the ages of 4-21 years old. All our services are free for the youth regardless of race, sex, ethnic background or income level. We have supported our program over the last year through our own efforts and now have grown beyond our resources. We are interested in applying for funding to assist us in meeting the continual needs of the youth.
Darren C. Darden
Program Director
Darden Enlightment Center
www.dardenenlightmentcenter.org
252-753-2165
— Darren Darden May 2, 09:17 PM #