DROPOUT SOLUTIONS SOUGHT
By Christine McDonald — The Detroit News
June 12, 2005 – A forum next week will address the issue of high school dropouts in Michigan, who are straining welfare rolls, filling prison cells and driving up Michigan's unemployment rate.
The Detroit News will sponsor the public event June 21 at Wayne State University to help generate solutions to the problem. On hand will be a panel of experts as well as students who have dropped out of school. The university's College of Education and WDIV-Local 4 are partners in the forum.
Michigan is struggling to get more students such as Ultileia Shoulders through high school.
When Shoulders got pregnant at 17 and dropped out, even she doubted whether she'd ever get her diploma. But after encouragement from family and a flexible class schedule at a Detroit charter school designed for dropouts, she's looking forward to graduating in December.
"I knew I wanted to go farther with my life," said Shoulders, 19, a student at Lifeskills Center of Detroit.
The forum grew out of a two-day series of articles that ran in The Detroit News on May 29 and 30, which found that an alarming number of the state's young people -- about 100,000 between the ages of 16 and 24 -- aren't in school and don't have a high school education.
Originally published in The Detroit News.