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Kareemah had transferred to Urban Youth Alternative High School on the recommendation of a counselor at Dunbar High. Kareemah had been falling behind at Dunbar and at one point stopped going. “You get with the wrong people, the wrong crowd, you take that about-face and don’t know how to turn yourself back around,” says Robin Wilson, Kareemah’s mother. “That’s more or less what happened.”
Run for decades as a “Double E” school–for education and employment–Urban Youth offered a work-study program to dropouts who wanted to finish school. Four years ago Urban Youth began granting diplomas, but it retained some of its “Double E” components; students could still earn credits for working a job. Urban Youth also offered a full class schedule year-round. “The idea was that since this was a different population of kids, kids who had problems in other schools could pretty much get all the credits they needed to get a diploma within two years,” says Capriles. “It was kind of like getting them through the program as quickly as possible and getting them to move on with their lives.”
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But Wilson felt the school should be given the support it needed to succeed. “You’ve got your statistics,” she says, “but my God, this isn’t the only school in the city of Chicago that’s doing as poorly as you say it is. I mean, come on now, let’s do our homework–you’ve got all these other high schools that are doing just as poorly, and what’s the problem there? Give these children a break. Put that school on probation. Reconstitute the school. Do what you have to do. But to shut the school totally? Yes, I was very upset about it.”
Urban Youth students were told they had several options when it came to finding another school. But for many of them, the board’s suggestion that they reenroll in their neighborhood high schools added insult to injury. “The whole reason they were in Urban Youth in the first place was because they couldn’t deal with their old high schools,” says Capriles. “It was like throwing them back to the wolves.” Youth Connection Charter School, which is a sort of legal umbrella for 26 private alternative schools that allows the school board to fund the education of public school students transferred to them, agreed to take 250 students as part of its contract with the board. Students were also referred to a handful of night schools. “There’s all sorts of opportunities,” says Vallas. “Anyone who wants to enroll in a program can enroll in a program. I can’t go in and physically enroll people myself. All I can do is make calls, write letters, hold workshops, and just hope that parents and students take responsibility for themselves and go in and enroll.” Vallas says the district will spend $250,000 to $300,000 tracking and counseling former Urban Youth students.
One administrator of a Youth Connection alternative school says that even though the schools agreed to accept the students, “we weren’t real happy with this. This was a huge number of kids to take in a short period of time.” Youth Connection schools are under contract to enroll a total of 1,400 public school transfers–out of the roughly 15,000 students who drop out every year. All 26 schools have waiting lists.
