Winning The Dropout Battle in Houston

HISD admits at least 19% of its students don’t finish high school.   When outside groups count, it could be as high as 38%.  Think about that for a second – that means in your freshman high school yearbook - you, the kid on the left or the kid on the right didn’t graduate.  I live in Houston and I have three little girls.  We’re trying to decide where to send our kids for school and this is a serious issue for me.   How can HISD educate the ones who stay while fighting a struggle to keep so many kids in class.

When HISD announced it was hiring a new superintendent, I thought there has to be a way to look at the challenge he is facing with dropouts.  So tonight we start – not by parading the problems, but looking at solutions.  Not the one thing that works everywhere, but a few things that make small differences.

I asked a few educational experts around town – Robert Sadler at Children at Risk was very generous with time and knowledge – for ideas of what’s working to keep kids in school.  Our pieces aren’t a comprehensive look at the problem – they’re snapshots of 3 programs making a difference one kid at a time.

We look at Project Grad tonight, a former Reagan HS student who’s now the school’s principal and trying to keep kids in class and a really unique charter school, Pro-Vision, on Thursday.  We end the week sitting down with HISD’s new superintendent – Dr. Terry Grier.

The one thing that comes through in all three pieces is that one on one attention works.  Roynell Young at Pro-Vision charter school says you have to prove to young men and women that they matter.  It’s what he does so well.  It’s what Project Grad does.  It is part of what Connie Berger is doing at Reagan High. 

I had fun spending time with 3 groups of people who are making a difference in Houston – not in some cliché sense, but one by one winning victories to keep kids in school.  That makes a difference.

I look forward to speaking with Dr. Grier.  The biggest question for him is how his new district can give one on one attention to 200,000 students?  They can’t – so how does he plan to make it work.

I hope you will join us for the pieces this week at 6.  Hopefully they will be posted here if you miss them.  Let me know what you think.  You can find me at ted.oberg@abc.com.

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