Over three million students drop out of high school each year, according to Statistic Brain. And although there have been many successful efforts to prevent future dropouts, such as Chicago’s After School Matters, few programs exist that give opportunities to students who have already quit school.
So that’s where Engage Santa Fe comes in. The idea behind it is to entice students to resume course work by enrolling in a program that’s more attractive to them and realistic for their lifestyle.
“[Dropouts] work 8 to 5. They have families. Who’s going to take care of the baby? Some of them are taking care of their brothers and sisters,” explains local resident Korina Nevarez to the Santa Fe New Mexican.
Given these challenges, creating just the right program has taken creativity, and getting it approved has taken a lot of perseverance. Luckily, Santa Fe’s educators never gave up, despite working on it for a while.
First approved by the school board this spring, Engage Santa Fe was originally going to be funded by the state and run by a private educational company from Florida — though after criticism from Santa Fe teachers, that company withdrew its bid to run the program. That didn’t stop it from moving forward, though; with a combination of funding from the Department of Labor, the school district, and the Santa Fe Community Foundation, the program is currently kicking off enrollment.
To help bring dropouts into the program, the school district has enlisted none better than the dropout’s own peers to canvass neighborhoods. Valerie Alvarado, 18, a recent graduate of Santa Fe High School, and Udell Calzadillas, 19, a student at University of New Mexico, are both peer recruiters. Their goal is to get at least 75 16- to 21-year-old dropouts to resume their education through Engage Santa Fe.
“I want to graduate,” one candidate for the program told them, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.
Hopefully, with the continued work of volunteers in Santa Fe, completing their education can be a reality not only the dropouts in the southwest city, but the millions of dropouts across America.
MORE: A Simple Solution For America’s Achievement Gap
Tag: k-12 public education
These High Schoolers Solved a Foodie Problem With a 3-D Printer
If you’ve ever had the unpleasant experience of squeezing out watery ketchup all over your hotdog, two high school students in Liberty, Missouri, have come up with just the invention you need.
Condiment experts Tyler Richards and Jonathan Thompson, both seniors studying in the Project Lead the Way Program (PLTW) at North Liberty High School, were challenged by their teacher, Brett Kisker, to come up with a solution to a problem that was relevant to them. “We always start with the phrase, ‘it really bugs me when,'” Kisker told Lindsey Foat of the Hale Center for Journalism at KCPT. (PLTW is a nonprofit that provides instruction and training in science and technology to students from kindergarten to high school, in the form of after-school programs and in-class lessons for teachers.)
What could be more relevant to a teenager than the perfect ketchup experience?
Kisker challenged their idea initially. “I said that they could just shake the bottle and that there is a free solution,” Kisker told Foat. “But they did a lot of research and they had me convinced that this problem really does exist.” The two teens found that many people would be willing to pay a little extra to have the watery ketchup problem solved. Additionally, a ketchup dispenser that doesn’t need to be shaken could help seniors and people with disabilities alike.
The students began their project by researching what patents had already been issued for ketchup inventions. “There are a surprising amount of ketchup-related patents out there,” Richards told Foat. “There was one — it’s kind of hard to explain — but basically it’s a way to inject ketchup into a french fry. It was a bit extreme.”
Next the students brainstormed, coming up with 60 possible solutions. The one they settled on is shaped like a mushroom and inserted into the underside of the ketchup cap. “It is based on the Pythagorean cup idea,” Thompson told Foat. “It’s also the same principle that toilets work off of.” They built their prototype using a 3-D printer and showed it at an exhibition of PLTW experiments in Kansas City.
The two don’t have any immediate plans to turn their ketchup idea into a business, however. Thompson has enlisted in the Army, and Richards will start at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in August. But whatever they do, their time spent as inventors probably means that they’ll never look at a bottle of ketchup the same way again.
MORE: Two Keys to the Future: 3-D Printing and Employed Veterans
Ask the Experts: 7 Ways to Improve K-12 Public Education
The United States bests almost every country in the world in many areas, but when it comes to educational achievement, American students are just plain mediocre. According to the most recent (2012) results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) — a test of critical thinking administered every three years to about half a million 15-year-olds around the globe — U.S. students are lagging behind those in many other countries, including China, Finland and Korea, in math, reading and science. Compared with other developed nations, the U.S. performs average or below. Worse, among the 34 countries surveyed, the U.S. school system ranked fifth in spending per student, at $115,000. That’s a hefty chunk of change for so-so results.
PISA scores aren’t the only measure of an educational system, but most experts agree that American schools are in need of a major overhaul. The question is: What kinds of reforms will result in lasting, meaningful changes?
As part of NationSwell’s Ask the Expert series, we asked our panel to share their ideas on how best to improve K-12 public education. Read on for their thoughts, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box.
MORE: The Radical School Reform That Just Might Work
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