adult relationship building

She only attended high school for a few weeks before dropping out. She got a job working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. By age 15, she was married and had a baby.

But that was years ago. Now, Debra Duardo, once a high school dropout, is working toward completing a doctorate degree from University of California Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

And, the Los Angeles Unified School District took away the interim portion of Duardo’s title last week, making Duardo the executive director of health and human services, according to a story published in Ampersand by UCLA.

Western Kansas University hosted a public media campaign to raise awareness of the dropout epidemic.

The university’s Public Broadcasting and the Educational Talent Search partnered together to bring the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s program that paired university students with at-risk middleschoolers. The mentoring relationship continues through high school graduation, according to an article in the College Heights Herald.

Students are trained on video equipment, audio, lighting, interviewing and storytelling. The students interviewed each other and created video diaries about the importance of high school graduation and why students chose to graduation. They will air on the university’s public station.

One of the students, Raymond Smith, a senior at Warren Central high school, said in his video that one of the reasons he wanted to graduate was because his sister dropped out.

Are you a mentor?

This January is the 12th National Mentoring Month, and it’s a great time to start making time to help a young person in your area.

The month was spearheaded by the Harvard Mentoring Project of the Harvard School of Public Health, MENTOR and the Corporation for National and Community Service. The goal is to connect adult mentors with young people to help give them guidance and help in their daily lives.

Students in a dropout prevention program in Hartford, Conn., are going to get even more help over the next two years.

As part of AT&T’s Aspire program, the Urban League of Greater Hartford has received a $210,000 donation to help fund the program, housed at Hartford Public High School, according to an article on CTNow.com.

The program, called the Urban League’s Youth Achievement Program, focuses on providing tutoring and mentoring to struggling ninth graders. The students stay in the program through 10th grade.

They are our children, our neighbors' children, our sons, our daughters, our grandchildren.

And right now, by some estimates, more than a million of them decide to drop out of school each year.

The choice to drop out will lead them down a path to low-paying jobs, poorer health, an increased possibility of jail time and the likely continuation of the cycle of poverty.

Put simply: they’re being left behind.

The world is in the midst of a knowledge and information explosion, and when our youth don't get the necessary education at the elementary and high school levels, they are likely to never recover. This could prevent them from contributing to society in a positive way and living up to, much less discovering, their own potential and passions.

Some students in Louisiana aren’t taking a break from their schooling during the holidays.

Instead, they are continuing to work toward graduation through the NoDropouts program, which is offered by the educational services company The American Academy, which also sponsors this blog.

It’s the end of another year, and that usually means it’s a good time to look back and reflect on what we’ve learned.

The excellent PBS NewsHour program American Graduate is sharing the knowledge its reporters have gained after traveling the country, meeting with dropouts, students, teachers, administrators and involved community members. They have visited hundreds of high schools and districts, figuring out just what works.

A mentoring-based dropout prevention program is looking for mentors in the Philadelphia area.

The group, called Spark, is based in San Francisco and has expanded to Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia.

The group pairs at-risk kids with mentors in apprenticeships that last eight to 10 weeks. The work with professionals in nearly all fields, from lawyers to photographers to computer technologists.

Though Christmas is over, we thought we’d share this heartwarming tale of educators and mentors helping kids in Mississippi graduate.

Students in southeast Mississippi are getting individual attention from mentors, teachers and administrators to help them overcome obstacles and make it across the stage.

Schools in the Pine Belt are working to step in when a student is at risk of dropping out, according to an article in the Hattiesburg American.