High Schools: Academies for Dropouts

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HIGH SCHOOLS

The latest enterprise of Union Carbide is located in a former liquor store on a street of squalid tenements and shops in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district. Similarly, the famed IBM trademark now hangs proudly over what was once a fruit market in Harlem. Neither company is looking for new customers in those quarters. Instead, both are serving as sponsors of "street academies," a new kind of informal learning program designed to lure high school dropouts to education and, hope fully, on to college.

Organized two years ago by New York City's Urban League, the program operates on the premise that the dropout hustling a living on the streets has a native savvy that can be channeled into the classroom. In the past year, eleven major U.S. corporations, including Time Inc., have anted up $30,000 to $50,000 as sponsors. The money pays for the leasing and remodeling of a ramshackle storefront, teachers' salaries, books, and the expenses of street workers, who roam the ghetto, "rapping" (talking) with dropouts and actively recruiting them for the academies. In turn, the corporation receives a shingle with its name in front of the school and the abstract benefit of a presence in the ghetto.

Sensitive to Needs. Harv Oostdyk, director of the program for the Urban League, argues that most slum children are potential college .material—shrewd, realistic decision makers whose choices often determine their own survival. "A kid who grows up on the streets," says Oostdyk, 35, who dropped out of New York University to become a youth worker, "is vastly more sensitive to human need and responses than most middle-class kids." The tragedy is that public schools have been unable to tap that potential.

The street workers, often storefront graduates themselves, make the initial contact with a promising dropout. Upon entering the academy, a youngster takes a bedrock curriculum of reading, English grammar and arithmetic. Once attending regularly, he moves on to a storefront Academy of Transition, where the spectrum of courses is broader and the teachers—often college graduates disillusioned with the public schools—attempt to stimulate his interest in further learning.

This fall, an estimated 300 graduates of the Academies of Transition will go on to a third and final level, at either New Jersey's privately endowed Newark Prep or the Urban League's Harlem Prep. Founded last October and already accredited, Harlem Prep has its own school song, navy blue blazers and an unmistakable esprit, de corps. Both schools have thus far sent 96 former dropouts to college.

Similar programs in other cities have been equally adept in educating on a shoestring basis. Last year, Chicago's Christian Action Ministry, a coalition of local churches, set up its own academy in a .onetime bank on the city's West Side. Granting dropouts freedom to work at their own pace, smoke in class, or enter the educational project even after a pregnancy or a hitch in jail, the C.A.M. Academy has chalked up a better college admittance record than that of Chicago's public high schools. Of the 30 dropouts who were graduated at C.A.M. this spring, 20 will go on to college in September. "When they get here, they are all messed up," says Mary Nelson, founder of the academy. "It takes six months to un-mess them."