Among the students in Callaway Middle School’s after-school program are, from left, Davona Hopson, Marisa Woodard, Keoshinique Thames, Kirstyn Gaddy and Crystal Sims. The Communities in Schools program is funded by a grant from the state Department of Human Resources.
“These are great jobs, but never before has the distance been greater between those who can take advantage of this opportunity and those who can’t,” LaGrange Mayor Jeff Lukken said Wednesday at a forum on Troup County’s dropout prevention program, Communities in Schools.
CIS started here 20 year ago at the behest of the education committee of the LaGrange-Troup County Chamber of Commerce. It was the first Georgia program outside of Atlanta to link community resources with students’ academic and social service needs.
The program has to battle dismal statistics: 23 percent of Troup County children live in poverty; 27 percent don’t finish high school; and 17.6 percent of children are born to teenagers.
“We at Communities in Schools interact daily with the faces behind the statistics,” said Executive Director Brenda Kennedy. “We have more challenges than at any other time,” but “I believe all children have the ability to learn and enter the workplace with a marketable skill or get an advanced degree.”
Sylvia Hooker, the county’s assistant superintendent for curriculum, said young people “must get the support they need to succeed. … We have no other choice.”
“When we save our children, we save our future,” added Albert B. Coleman, who lobbies the state and federal government on behalf of Communities in Schools. “And if we don’t, we pay the cost.”
Kennedy said CIS needs more government funding to have full-time, rather than part-time, site coordinators at each middle and high school because “we could work with more students and bring in more community resources.”
State Reps. Randy Nix and Carl Von Epps also attended Wednesday’s conference at Callaway Middle School, along with some of the 25 middle school students in CIS’s after-school program who receive tutoring and mentoring, life skills training and computer training under a grant from the state Department of Human Resources.
Nix praised Gov. Sonny Perdue’s recent initiative that provided graduation coaches at all middle and high schools.
“We must focus more on our young folks in middle school,” Nix said. “By the time they get to high school it’s hard to pull them back in and get them do what they need to do.”
Joel Martin can be reached at jmartin@lagrangenews com or (706) 884-7311, Ext. 235.
How about lets talk about the black community needs to raise expectation of their kids where we dont have a 75% illegtimate birth rate, and a 85% are on Medicare, Welfare, Foodstamps, WICC, ect.
These are the people that are a burden to society and more should be expected of them instead of us constantly being expected to lift them out of poverty