Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Education / Woods Task Force Reports on Dropout Rate
Posted by Jeff Woods on Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:03 PM
The mayor’s much-ballyhooed “Project for Student Success” task force released its final report today. While many of the recommendations are obvious—one, for instance, says teachers should take attendance—the whole exercise was almost guaranteed success from the beginning in at least one way: It focused the city on reducing Nashville’s school dropout rates and created a bunch of cheerleaders for that goal. All 40 of the task force’s members—community leaders who spent 1,600 hours over six months studying the problem—are now heavily invested in the making sure something happens.
Mayor Dean took the opportunity to announce a new initiative: He’s developing a coordinated system of after-school programs for middle school students. The task force recommended providing access to better after-school programs as one way to keep kids from dropping out.
“A student doesn’t just wake up one day and decide not to go back to school,” the mayor said. “It’s clear from the work of the task force and other research in this area that the path to dropping out can start as early as elementary and middle school.
“Providing after-school programs that are accessible to all students, especially students identified as at-risk of dropping out, is a proven way to intervene in those students’ lives and provide the support they need to stay in school and be successful.”
Dean's idea is to create "after-school zones," which he says will be coordinated networks of existing programs with consistent standards on the types of services provided. The first zone will be created in one school cluster this fall, he says.
The task force report is available here.
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