To get students to graduation, grassroots initiatives must keep going and keep growing

Each time our society allows a student to drop out from school, we enter into a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in social services and potential incarceration costs.

So what if we could keep students in school for a mere $250 a year? 

"We think that's a pretty good investment," Paula Morris, founder of the Maryland-based Kids of Honor program, told The Daily Times.

Founded in 2001, Kids of Honor reaches out to local struggling youth with one key objective: To help them graduate high school. The program — which costs just about $250 per year, per student — boasts an impressive record of success: Every student involved in the initiative has graduated, according to the organization's Website. The program is still small, however: Three Kids of Honor graduated in 2007, fourteen in 2008, twenty-six in 2009 and twenty-five in 2010.

In a speech on education reform in Austin, earlier this month, Preisdent Obama said "we know what works — it’s just we’re not doing it."

The president was bit soft of the details of what, exactly, are those things that "work." But presumably he was talking about initiatives like Kids of Honor, the laudable Knowledge is Power Program, and The American Academy's dropout recovery service. These programs can and do work to help at-risk students graduate, each in a different way.  

But now, the big question: Are programs like these scalable? If Kids of Honor works for 25 students, can it work for 250? How about 25,000? How about 2 million?

The only way to find out is to keep going — and to keep growing.

What doesn't work on a larger scale can always be returned to a smaller scale. But what does work can change students' lives.